Images

In the Rocky Mountain West, people and wildlife inhabit many of the same areas and USGS scientists are studying wildlife diseases, such as brucellosis in elk and bison, and how these diseases are transmitted between domestic and non-domestic hosts. 

Local Ducks hanging out at home in the park.

Standing on the Earth and Dam at Cougar as the fog rolled in between the snow capped mountains.

This Chinook was tagged and then released back into the Klickitat River where we tracked its movements up and down the river.

Upstream view at the Cougar Dam lookout point on a cold winter morning.

Radio tracking adult Chinook and steelhead on the Klickitat River in the fall.

Arrival of Salish Sea Tribal Canoes with USGS water quality sampling instrumentation onboard.

The Souris River at Westhope, North Dakota. The top photos taken on April 26, 1970, with a discharge of 1,110 cfs. And the bottom photo taken on April 19, 2011, with a discharge of 13,300 cfs and a gage height of 19.82 feet.

The Little Missouri River at Medora, North Dakota. Top photo taken by a USGS personnel in March of 1972, while the Little Missouri River was flooding the camp sites at Medora, ND. The bottom photo was taken by USGS Colton Rupp on May 24, 2011, with a discharge of 32,000 cfs and a gage height of 19.42 feet.

Pallid sturgeon eggs freshly spawned and fertilized in a laboratory at the Columbia Environmental Research Center.

The USGS National Wildlife Health Center works to identify, track, and prevent wildlife disease. A USGS technician works with a prairie dog as part of the center's efforts to protect prairie dogs, and in turn the endangered black-footed ferret, from plague.

Researchers from the USGS National Wildlife Health Center examine a duck as part of part of efforts to identify, track, and prevent wildlife disease.

Dr. David Shelly is a research seismologist with the USGS.

A small slough in Suisun Slough in the Suisun Bay, California.

The USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory uses a variety of ground- and satellite-based techniques to monitor Hawai‘i’s active volcanoes.  Here, an HVO scientist sets up a portable GPS receiver to track surface changes during an island-wide survey of Hawai‘i’s volcanoes.

In the drier Arizona upland plant communities, pictured here, some species will likely decline with forecasted climate change (such as foothill paloverde, ocotillo and creosote bush) while cacti may well increase in abundance and range.

USGS scientist Peter Van Metre examines a parking lot where coal-tar sealcoat has been applied.

To present the most information in a single view of Jupiter's moon, Io, a global color mosaic, derived from Galileo color images, was superposed on a higher resolution image mosaic, derived from merging the best resolution images from spacecrafts Galileo and Voyager 1.

The May 12, 2008, Great Sichuan Earthquake, also called the Wenchuan Earthquake, occurred at 14:28 local time, in Sichuan Province, China. The earthquake magnitudes were Mw = 7.9 (USGS), Ms = 8.0 (Chinese Earthquake Administration). The epicenter was 80 km west-northwest of Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province.

An endangered Hawaiian hoary bat, a species that is sometimes killed by wind turbines.

The Black Noddy (with a chick) is one of eight seabird species whose population density was studied on the French Frigate Shoals' Tern Island by biologists with the USGS Pacific Island Ecosystems Research Center's Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Climate Change Project.