Images

 Sara Zeigler (USGS) uses the smartphone data collection app ‘iPlover’ to classify the landscape characteristics in an area immediately surrounding a piping plover nest (here, protected with a black mesh predator exclosure).

Human modifications to beaches, such as sand fencing, sea walls and rock jetties, can alter natural beach processes like overwash. This can affect how much habitat for species like piping plovers is created by storms.

USGS scientists are working to model shorebird habitat availability both today and in the future, given processes like sea-level rise, in an effort to support the efficient management of beaches for both people and nesting shorebirds. This photo shows an area on the Rockaway Peninsula where high quality shorebird habitat has been closed off to beach recreation.

The beach-dependent shorebirds project at the Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center models current and future habitat availability for nesting shorebirds in an effort to map current and likely future habitat availability on a range of sites along the U.S. Atlantic coast.

A piping plover parent and chicks.

A buoy instrumented to collect meteorological observations is recovered off Fire Island, NY in 2014.  The data collected is part of a study of the coastal processes that mobilize and transport sediment in the region
 

A remotely operated vessel starts a survey at dawn off Fire Island, NY in 2014.  The data collected is part of a study of the coastal processes that mobilize and transport sediment in the region

USGS tilt current meter (white cylinder) in overwash channel in the Sandwich Town Beach flooded during a Nor'Easter in March 2014

Every inch of the deck of the R/V Connecticut is covered by instrumented platforms awaiting deployment on the seafloor south of Fire Island NY in winter 2014.

  Every inch of the deck of the R/V Connecticut is covered by instrumented platforms awaiting deployment on the seafloor south of Fire Island NY in winter 2014. 

Snowy owl visitor to CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent in the Arctic Ocean

Shaded relief image of Vineyard Sound, MA Shoals

USGS technicians prepare a sediment trap to sample the sea floor off Cape Hatteras.

USGS research chemist John Pohlman samples seep gas through ice in Lake Qalluuraq, located in continuous permafrost approximately 97 kilometers (60 miles) south of Barrow, Alaska.

Eric Moore, Wayne Baldwin, and Tommy O’Brien are deploying multichannel seismic streamer onboard R/V Pelican during a 2013 seismic cruise in the Gulf of Mexico as part of the gas hydrates program. 

A sonar on a bottom platform while steaming to the deployment site in the Columbia River in 2013.  The 3 platforms acquired data on currents and sediment transport at the river mouth over several months.

Sandy Brosnahan transporting a weather buoy into the Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center’s operational facility to continue the process of getting it ready to deploy.  This buoy was one of 6, deployed by John Warner and others, to measure wind speed, direction, pressure, and temperature off the coast of Fire Island, NY.  Paired with each weather b

Investigators prepare to place a Shallow Water Irradience Platform (SWIP) at a site in Barnegat Bay, NJ.

USGS research supports wetland conservation as critical habitat, Cape Cod, MA

Equipment used for a measuring lateral fluxes over tidal cycle