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Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center

In the News

Among the five proposals to be funded by the USGS John Wesley Powell Center in 2017 is Accounting for U.S. Ecosystem Services at National and Subnational Scales, of which GECSC Research Economist Ken Bagstad is a Principal Investigator. This is the first proposal accepted by the Center in the field of economics.

Ken, along with Jane Carter Ingram of Ernst and Young and Carl Shapiro of the Science and Decisions Center, are working to build a foundation for a national natural capital accounting system. Natural capital accounting is a tool used to track changes in ecosystem services (the benefits that nature provides to society and the economy) and directly tie these changes to costs and benefits across different economic sectors. This working group intends to compile the data, modeling, and valuation infrastructure to support natural capital accounting for the United States as well as apply it at the subnational scale, within a landscape managed by multiple Federal agencies.

The John Wesley Powell Center serves as a catalyst for innovative thinking in Earth system science research by providing the time, creative space, and resources to promote synthesis of existing information and emergent knowledge.

Our Mission

Our world is being transformed due to climate variability, population growth, intensive land use, and the increasing demands on water, ecological, agricultural, energy, and mineral resources. To address these issues, the Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center (GECSC) conducts research on (1) climatic, environmental, and landscape changes, (2) the geologic framework of natural resources and hazards, (3) ecological disturbance patterns resulting from natural and anthropogenic changes, and (4) the interactions among geologic, biologic, hydrologic, and human systems. This work supports policy and management decisions, the search for new sources of key materials, and the assessment of the combined environmental impacts of climate variability and human activities.

Latest Products and Highlights

November 16, 2016

A trans-national monarch butterfly population model and implications for regional conservation priorities

By Karen Oberhauser, Rucsena Wiederholt, Jay Diffendorfer (GECSC), Darius Semmens (GECSC), Leslie Ries, Wayne Thogmartin, Laura López-Hoffman, and Brice Semmens. Published in Ecological Entomology.

The governments of Mexico, Canada, and the United States have agreed to work together to protect the monarch butterfly, a species that has undergone considerable population decline over the past decade. To support planning for continental-scale monarch habitat restoration, this study addresses the question of where efforts are likely to have the largest impacts on the monarch's population growth rate. The model employed suggests that conservation investment in projects across the full monarch range will be more effective than focusing on one or a few regions, and will require international cooperation across many land use categories.

November 8, 2016

Bedrock morphology and structure, upper Santa Cruz Basin, south-central Arizona, with transient electromagnetic survey data

By Mark Bultman and Ric Page (GECSC). USGS Open-File Report 2016-1152.

This report provides an analysis of geophysical data from the Rio Rico and Nogales 1:24,000-scale USGS quadrangles, which includes the city of Nogales, Arizona. The primary objective of this publication is to describe the depth to bedrock, general morphology and structure of the upper Santa Cruz Basin in the study area, and define its relationship to the geohydrology of the region.

November 4, 2016

Improving spatio-temporal benefit transfers for pest control by generalist predators in cotton in the southwestern US

By Ruscena Wiederholt, Ken Bagstad (GECSC), Gary McCracken, Jay Diffendorfer (GECSC), John Loomis, Darius Semmens (GECSC), Amy Russell, Chris Sansone, Kelsie LaSharr, Paul Cryan, Claudia Reynoso, Rodrigo Medellín and Laura López-Hoffman. Published in the International Journal of Biodiversity Science, Ecosystem Services & Management.

This study presents a benefit transfer approach to quantify the economic value of pest control in cotton crops that is provided by a generalist predator, the Mexican free-tailed bat, in the southwestern United States. It is shown that pest-control estimates derived when accounting for key spatial and temporal aspects (such as cotton varieties, crop prices, and pesticide use) are likely to exhibit less error than those derived using simple-spatial or simple-temporal approaches. With the compound spatial-temporal approach, the annualized pest-control value was $12.2 million, in contrast to an estimate of $70.1 million (5.7 times overestimate) obtained from the simple-spatial approach. The report also presents a detailed protocol for valuing pest-control services, which can be used to develop robust pest-control transfer functions for other generalist predators in agroecosystems.

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