Images

USGS hydrologists prepare to deploy a BM-54 bed-material sampler on the Yellowstone River.

Banded adult Piping Plover on river mile 1334 of the Missouri River, North Dakota

Polar bears spend much of their lives in and around water, and they are well adapted for swimming.

Polar bear pulling himself out of the ocean onto the sea ice.

Polar bear pulling himself out of the ocean onto the sea ice.

Polar bear drying off after a swim in the Chukchi sea.

Polar bear laying down to dry after a swim in the Chukchi sea.

Bruce Manny and Tom Edsall retrieve incubators containing lake trout embryos from spawning grounds in the Fox Island Refuge in northern Lake Michigan.

Ticks spread the widest variety of diseases that are harmful to humans, including Lyme disease. This is an image of blacklegged tick nymphs, or immature deer ticks.

A male (light colored) and a female (dark colored) Yosemite toads mating.

A USGS employee uses an instrument to measure the elevation at Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge in southern California, in contribution to a study on sea level rise's impact on coastal wetlands.

Tegu preying in on the crocodile nest.

A blue bee trap is located in a Colorado grassland. These are used to collect bee specimens for lab study. Credit: Mark Vandever, USGS.

Tegu preying in on the crocodile nest.

Adult Piping Plover showing broken-wing display to lure predator away from nest.

Native seedlings along the Colorado River consisting of a mix of mostly Baccharis, tamarisk, and a couple of cottonwoods.A peso coin is included for scale. 

Upriver view of the Colorado River where it meets the ocean. This photo was taken after the Minute 319 pulse flow to to simulate natural spring floods. Water provided by the Minute 319 agreement between the United States and Mexico is intended to promote riparian habitat restoration along the river in its delta. 

Between 2009 and 2018, scientists conducted a national scale assessment of mercury accumulation in the National Park System using dragonfly larvae as biosentinels (species that accumulate a pollutant in their tissues as an index of exposure to other organisms without significant adverse effects to the biosentinel) through a citizen science network called the Dragonf

A CERC pond being used for a sturgeon study is being mapped using an aDcp mounted on a River Ray.

Boat equipped with singlebeam sonar for mapping the bed of a river at shallow depths along the shoreline of the Colorado River.

Dave Walsh, Acting center Director, and Bob O'Gorman, fishery biologist sort the catch aboard the RV/Kaho in Lake Ontario.