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.

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.

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

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.

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. 

NPS citizen scientist Eleanor Comings counts loon carcasses at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore during a large botulism outbreak in October of 2012.

A screenshot from the USGS film "Living with Fire".

USGS Western Ecological Research Center ecologist Carlton Rochester handles a rattlesnake in San Diego County, Calif.

A family of Florida panthers walking in the night.

Miradiscops opal shell viewed with a scanning electron microscope.

Thysanophora caecoides shell viewed with a scanning electron microscope.

Spiraxis sp. shell viewed with a scanning electron microscope with aperture facing up.

National Wetlands Research Center workers set bench marks to study marsh subsidence.

Scanning shortnose sturgeon for PIT (Passive Integrated Transponder) identification tag, used to permanently mark fish.

Zoe Zyollewski handles an adult Atlantic salmon caught in the Connecticut River.

Prairie Pothole Region landscape showing high wetland density.

Fishery biologists Gary Curtis and Renee Potter guide the trawl net as it is let out from the RV/Grayling into Lake Huron.

This southern sea otter is settling down to rest in a small patch of Egregia (feather boa kelp). Find more sea otter photos at the USFWS Ventura sea otter Flickr gallery.

Yellow bellied flycatcher in the Presidential Range, White Mountains, NH