Research Highlights

Some National Research Program (NRP) publications and products of regional, national, or international interest are described in the links below. The NRP in the hydrological sciences encompasses a broad spectrum of scientific investigations and focuses on long-term integrated studies related to water resource and environmental problems. The NRP provides an infrastructure within which the USGS can develop new information, theories, and techniques to understand, anticipate, and solve water-resource problems facing managers of Federal lands and the Nation.

• Amargosa Desert: Studies of nitrogen and carbon
  
  
• Climate Change and Water Availability: Recent Publications
  
  
• Climate Change: Making a central assumption of water management obsolete
  
  
• Climate-Driven Ocean Changes Affect Estuaries: Pacific Ocean Cooling Triggers Phytoplankton Blooms in San Francisco Bay
  
  
• Climate Models: Understanding global shifts in water availability
  
  
• Drought: Climate, drought, and streamflow patterns
  
  
• Endocrine Disruption Found in Fish Exposed to Municipal Wastewater
  
  
• Grand Canyon: Sediment processes
  
  
• Hydrogen Measured in a New Test for Determining Subsurface Microbiological Activity at Contamination Sites
  
  
• Microbiology: Arsenic-metabolizing bacteria in an extreme environment
  
  
• Platte River: Assessing sandhill crane roosting distribution
  
  
• Potomac River: Benefits from an exotic species of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV)
  
  
• Repeat Photography: Documenting long-term changes in the riverine environments of Arizona
  
  
• San Francisco Bay: An estuarine laboratory
  
  
• Soil and Water Chemical Analyses: Used to determine origin of prehistoric maize
  
  
• USGS Science Featured in a Special Issue of Applied Geochemistry on Contamination from Oil Production
  
  
• Volcanic Gas Hazards: Mammoth Mountain, Calif. and Cameroon
  
  
• Wastewater Indicators Shown to Degrade in Streams
  
  
• Watersheds: Water and solute mass balance
  
  
• Water Quality: A holistic watershed approach in Boulder Creek, Colorado
  
  
• Widespread Accumulations of Natural Perchlorate in Southwestern Soils
  
  
• Wildfire: Risk of floods and erosion
  
  
• Yukon River: Global warming affect on water quality and hydrology

New Technology

• USGS Hydrologic and Geochemical Models
  
  
• Advances in Dating Ground Water
  
  
• Bedrock-Aquifer Transportable Testing Tool (BAT³) for Fractured-Rock Aquifers
  
  
• Patents

For additional highlights, see Previously Listed Highlights and U.S. Geological Survey Circular 1195, which is available in pdf format, and provides highlights of some of the research problems that were being addressed when it was published in 2000.