Images

View of the barrier islands off Lafayette, LA while conducting low-level aerial seabird surveys in the Gulf of Mexico, as part of the GoMMAPPS project.

Oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico viewed as part of GoMMAPPS aerial surveys for seabirds.

An adult male Northern Harrier (Circus cyaneus) surveys Suisun Marsh, CA. Males are known for their beautiful, steel-gray plumage.

A Federally endangered salt marsh harvest mouse (Reithrodontomys raviventris) climbs a branch.

An adult, female northern harrier (Circus cyaneus) flies overhead in Suisun Marsh, CA. Before habitat loss drove declines in the bird's populations, Suisun Marsh hosted the state's largest population of northern harriers.

These tree cores, taken from living trees with an increment borer, show the rings of the tree and allow scientists to learn about the tree's growth.

Photograph of a Lark Bunting nest with four eggs.  Nest was found in Phillips County, Montana.

Photograph of a Horned Lark nest with newly hatched nestlings.  Nest was found in Phillips County, Montana near S. Wagner Road.

Standard wing markings on a US Fish and Wildlife Service Kodiak amphibious aircraft used to denote strip-transect distance bands to aid observers in data collection for the GoMMAPPS aerial seabird surveys from 2017-2020 and 2022-2023.

A view through the belly port of a plane while cameras collect images during an aerial photographic survey.

The Seabird Studies Team at the USGS Western Ecological Research Center is conducting aerial photographic surveys of the ocean off central and southern California to create comprehensive maps of seabird and marine mammal distributions.

On-site mobile laboratory located near groundwater monitoring wells on Cape Cod, Massachusetts

On-site mobile laboratories located near groundwater monitoring wells on Cape Cod, Massachusetts

Tile drainage pipe being installed in wetland catchment to reduce water inflow into a wetland basin in North Dakota.

Biological Science Technician surveying breeding birds on a grassland managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Land cover map of an area of the Missouri River used to classify potential breeding habitat for least terns and piping plovers on emergent sandbars.

USGS scientist Zach Wenderott extracts a tree core from a charred ponderosa pine in Lassen National Park as part of a study of how prescribed fire influences tree growth.

Photograph of Radio-collared wolf. Radio-collared wolves are aerially tracked and the numbers of their packmates are counted annually

A native brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis) visiting leadplant (Amorpha canescens).

Great egret at a multi-species waterbird nesting colony at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge, North Dakota.

– Scientists at the USGS Massachusetts Cooperative Fish and
Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in
collaboration with The Rockefeller University’s Vertebrate Genome Laboratory,
New York, are releasing to a public repository at the vertebrate lab, for use by

Citizen scientists after a day of collecting dragonfly larvae for the Dragonfly Mercury Project.