Reports

Introduction Connecticut has a diverse, largely forested landscape characterized by hills and low mountains in the Western Upland, hills in the Eastern Upland, ridges and broad valleys in the Central Lowland, and many beaches and harbors along the coast of Long Island Sound. Connecticut is manufacturing and service focused, ranking almost highest among the 50 States in the United States...

Introduction Established in 1935, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program is a unique cooperative partnership among State fish and wildlife agencies, host universities, the Wildlife Management Institute, USGS, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Designed to meet the scientific needs of natural resource management agencies and to produce...

The U.S. Geological Survey’s National Civil Applications Center obtained remote sensing data and imagery collected from 1939 through 2023 to monitor changes at Fire Island National Seashore, New York. On October 29, 2012, an inlet was created during Hurricane Sandy on Fire Island that remained open for 10 years. This inlet, named the “Wilderness Breach,” formed at the same location where...

The U.S. Geological Survey is working with Federal land management agencies to develop a series of science syntheses to support National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analyses. This report synthesizes science information about the potential effects of nonmotorized recreation on ungulates in the western United States. We conducted a structured literature search to find published science...

The calcified structures of fishes provide insight into their periodic growth rates and can be combined with other biological variables to identify metrics such as size or age at maturity and mortality rates. Collecting this information on growth and life history can help evaluate the success of conservation efforts and inform future management decisions for a species in need. However...

The U.S. Geological Survey recently (2025) completed a provisional assessment of the geothermal-electric resources associated with high-temperature, low-permeability rock formations of the Great Basin, Southwestern United States. If sufficient technological advances to commercialize enhanced geothermal systems occur, then a current best provisional estimate for electric-power generation...

Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated undiscovered, technically recoverable mean conventional and continuous resources of 473 million barrels of oil and 27 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Mowry Composite Total Petroleum System in the Southwestern Wyoming Province, Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah.

Digital flood-inundation map libraries for two reaches that constitute 14.8 miles of Little and Big Papillion Creeks in Omaha, Nebraska, were created by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in cooperation with the Papio-Missouri River Natural Resource District. The flood-inundation maps, which can be accessed through the USGS Flood Inundation Mapping Program website at https://www.usgs.gov...

A major storm caused catastrophic flooding in many parts of Vermont on July 9–12, 2023, resulting in millions of dollars in damages. The high amount of rainfall caused several rivers to peak at record levels, in some cases exceeding records set during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, collected and...

Frequency analysis on annual peak streamflow (hereinafter, peak flow) is essential to water-resources management applications, including critical structure design (for example, bridges and culverts) and floodplain mapping. Nonstationarity is a statistical property of a peak-flow series such that the distributional properties (the mean, variance, or skew) change either gradually...

The U.S. Geological Survey National Wildlife Health Center provides diagnostic services to determine causes of wildlife morbidity and mortality events to State, Federal, and Tribal partners. To accomplish this, we rely on the timely collection and evaluation of submitted carcasses and the epidemiologic information relayed from personnel in the field. Our current submission criteria can...

The Long Island Sound and its watershed encompass an area of about 17,000 square miles and include the Connecticut, Housatonic, and Thames Rivers, which all drain to the sound. Dozens of organizations from government agencies, nonprofits, and Tribal Nations have developed projects and monitoring programs to analyze and protect the water resources of the watershed and sound. The abundance...