Images

A biological science technician prepares the swim chambers to assess the swimming abilities of young pallid sturgeon.

Across the desert Southwest, ground void of plant material is prone to soil erosoin and dust storms. In this fallowed agricultural field, we see that a spring breeze can carry away fertile top soil and create air quality concerns.

Oil pad near Vernal, Utah

A biological science technician collects pallid sturgeon free embryos from the sampling nets in the experimental streams at the Columbia Environmental Research Center.

Limited information is available about the movements of riverine smallmouth bass in landscapes with prevalent river-reservoir interfaces. This lack of information is especially problematic for the Neosho subspecies of smallmouth bass given the distribution covers an interwoven landscape of rivers and reservoirs.

A montage of four Chesapeake Bay aerial photos. L-R: A waterfront residential community; row crops bordered by forest; Baltimore Harbor; piers and crab pots in a waterfront fishing community.

Vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) are the primary spreader of rabies, a lethal disease that harms livestock and people across Latin America, where this bat lives. 

Measurement stakes are carried across Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana, during spring mass balance field work in 2019.

Researchers get organized to begin mass balance field work after skiing to Sperry Glacier.

Snow core measurements help scientists determine snow density, which is used to determine the mass balance of Sperry Glacier.

Researchers get organized to begin mass balance field work after skiing to Sperry Glacier.

An extremely rare Mojave River western pond turtle was recently observed by USGS scientists and staff from The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens in the Mojave Desert. Turtles of this population have rarely been seen since the late 1990s.

Researchers examine a bat (Myotis sp.) to test for the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome.

Brown patches and brown stems show stress in this phagmites (roseau cane) stand in Pass A Loutre Wildlife Management Area, a tract of state-owned land in Louisiana's bird foot delta, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. An ongoing phragmites was first discovered in spring 2017 and blamed on an invasive scale insect from Asia.

The Wildcat experimental treatment site in southwest Idaho at the base of the Owyhee Mountains. The brown square was treated with pre-emergent herbicide and is free of cheatgrass, a few native perennial bunchgrasses were able to establish. This image was taken the first Spring after treatment.

USGS scientist collecting water quality parameters from Horn Creek, a small side drainage in Grand Canyon in Aprill, 2017

A female Red-breasted Nuthatch with an elongated deformed beak. It was captured in Anchorage as part of the beak deformity research project. Avian keratin disorder (AKD) is a disease characterized by debilitating beak overgrowth and other abnormalities of keratinized tissues.

Mule deer investigating a game camera in Madison Valley, Montana.

Researcher swabs the body of a honeybee with fuschin gel to later use to identify the pollen particles on the bee's body and determine what plants the bee visited.

Mark Ford and his graduate students at the Virginia Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (Ecosystems Mission Area, USGS), on the Virginia Tech campus, lead research on white-nose syndrome in bats across the mid-Atlantic states and northeast U.S. The research focuses on habitat use, distribution, and population ecology.

Vegetation assessments are part of an effort to produce seamless, consistent, and high resolution landcover data for the northern portion of the western gulf coastal plain. This geography was once dominated by tallgrass prairie and has undergone dramatic change with less than 1% of this natural habitat in existence.