Images

This is a young golden eagle in its third winter. Golden eagles generally don't reach adulthood until about their fifth year.

There are two juvenile golden eagles. Golden eagles are one of the largest birds in North America. They have a wingspan from 72.8 to 86.6 inches.

Who's who?  These are print casts of front and back paw prints of a grizzly bear (top) and black bear (bottom). The casts on the right are the front paws of each species; the casts on the left are the back.  How do you tell? 

After Hurricane Michael obliterated Fish Inn, the sea turtle research team's field station, team members salvaged some of the building's floor tiles and made this sea turtle mosaic, which they plan to eventually install in a new field station.

Root nodules are a symbiotic relationship between a plant and nitrogen-fixing bacteria. A symbiotic relationship is one where both organisms benefit. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria change inorganic nitrogen from the air into ammonia, a form of nitrogen most organisms can use.

Miriam Jones holding a peat core that was extracted from a thawed permafrost bog at the Alaska Permafrost Experiment (APEX) site at Bonanza Creek LTER, Alaska. The boundary between the formerly frozen permafrost plateau and thawed bog is visible in the peat stratigraphy, with the light-colored peat indicated thawed bog.

Hexagon-based aerial survey design with transects overlaid. The EPA 40 km² hexagons (White et al. 2018) were overlaid across the entirety of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Sampled hexagons were then selected using a Generalized Random Tesselation Stratified (GRTS) sampling scheme.

Map of Alaska showing probability (%) of change occurrence. Insets show fire boundaries from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Large Fire Database and Landsat 8 imagery (bottom right; 2016) north of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Photograph of the flowers of Dakota wild buckwheat (Eriogonum visheri).

It is native to the Great Plains in the United States, where it is known from North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana.

USGS wildlife biologists holding a juvenile salt marsh harvest mouse (Reithrodontomys raviventris). The species is listed as "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.

Flames from the Woodbury Fire rise above Tonto National Monument.

The USGS along with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) funded a pilot study to use a long-range AUV to study limnology of Lake Michigan. The AUV is pictured here being deployed in Lake Michigan to document variation in algae productivity at a whole-lake scale and compare 3-D spatial patterns in chlorophyll a to satellite estimates.

A sea otter mother feeds her pup in Glacier Bay, Alaska. USGS researchers study sea otter distribution and abundance in Alaska and other parts of the country.

Aquatic insect eggs are laid on rocks just at the waterline along the Colorado River in Grand Canyon and here they are exposed as the water levels fluctuate. Aquatic insects are an important part of the food base in the Colorado River, providing food for fish, bats, and birds. Aquatic insects need to stay damp to survive and hatch.

These two NOAA satellite images show Cape San Blas Road in the Florida Panhandle town of Cape San Blas before Hurricane Michael, and after the Category 5 storm. The red circle shows where the USGS sea turtle researchers' field station and seasonal home once stood. The building was demolished down to the concrete slab.

Source: USGS National Wetlands Research Center. Photographer: Brad M. Glorioso. St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana

Necturus beyeri - Gulf Coast Waterdog

Eastern Iowa Ambystoma laterale - Blue-spotted Salamander. USGS ARMI photo by Evan S. Grimes

The alfalfa leafcutting bee (Megachile rotundata) is an introduced species common to Southwest Idaho. They originate from the old world, most likely from northeastern Africa or the Middle East. These bees are successful pollinators of various crops and have been imported to North America for use in agriculture and beekeeping.

Image collage of USGS Ecosystems Mission Area scientists in the field. 

Opening slide for the Intro to GenEst, A Generalized Estimator of Mortality, Workshop held at the National Wind Coordinating Collaborative's Wind Wildlife Research Meeting XII on November 26, 2018 in St. Paul Minnesota.

A burrowing owl, captured by a wildlife camera, standing next to the enterence of its den.