Reports

Delaware’s status as the first State to ratify the U.S. Constitution is a well-known point of pride. “The First State” is among Delaware’s nicknames, alongside “the Blue Hen State,” “the Diamond State,” and “the Small Wonder,” the last of which relates to Delaware’s diminutive land area—larger only than Rhode Island. Less well known, perhaps, is Delaware’s geographic distinction as the...

Louisiana holds a unique historical, economic, and cultural position in the national consciousness. Its off-shore oil operations help fuel the U.S. economy. The Port of South Louisiana is the busiest in the United States by cargo volume; the nearby Port of New Orleans is the sixth busiest. The former French and Spanish colony served as a key connection to the Caribbean long before U.S

Iowa is famous for plenty of reasons—its State Fair butter sculptures, its first-in-the-Nation presidential caucuses, and the Iowa Hawkeyes football team, whose mascot doubles as the State nickname—but “corn” might be the first word to cross the mind of a non-Iowan. Iowa consistently leads the United States in corn production and in the production of hogs, which in turn consume a sizable...

At its widest point, a mere 80 miles separate the eastern and western borders of New Hampshire. Its northern and southern borders are just 175 miles apart. Even so, few States can boast as much rugged natural beauty per mile as the Nation’s fifth smallest. Nestled within New Hampshire are 93 State parks teeming with moose, Ursus americanus (Pallas, 1780; black bears), coyotes, beavers...

The northern and central parts of the Tug Hill glacial aquifer consist of a 29-mile-long, crescent-shaped, mixture of glaciofluvial, glaciolacustrine, and recent alluvial deposits of predominantly sand and gravel on the western side of the Tug Hill Plateau in Jefferson and Oswego Counties in north-central New York. Approximately 11,400 people are supplied by groundwater that is withdrawn...

Kansas seems synonymous with agriculture, and rightly so—87 percent of Kansas land is devoted to it. As a key contributor to the State’s economy, agriculture makes Kansas one of the top producers of wheat, grain sorghum, and cattle in the country, but the State at the geographic center of the conterminous United States contains much more than fields and pastures. Deciduous woodlands...

The rolling plains of Nebraska occupy a storied place in the American psyche. For those living outside the Midwest, the Cornhusker State may be seen as a symbol of the Nation’s heartland, cropped border to border, with country churches and barely standing barns to be found around every turn of its gravel roads. Although the pioneer history and agricultural heritage of the 37th State lend...

Wisconsin could be called a State of icons, and many of the icons can trace their roots to the abundant resources within its four borders. Big beer companies in Milwaukee that began in the 1800s made their beer from water from nearby lakes and rivers, kept it cool with ice from those same sources, and stored it in containers made of harvested wood from State forests. Dairy and cheese...

Alley Creek, a tributary to Little Neck Bay in Queens County, New York, has been designated by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation as impaired (Class I) for fecal coliform because of pollution from combined sewer overflow, including stormwater runoff. The U.S. Geological Survey, in cooperation with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection...

Among important seabird breeding sites in the main Hawaiian Islands, Lehua Island offshore Niʻihau and Moku Manu Islets offshore Oʻahu support diverse and abundant seabird breeding populations. Both offshore islands provide excellent nesting habitat for surface-nesting boobies (Sula spp.) and terns but, of the two, only Moku Manu supports relatively large breeding populations of Sooty...

The clarity of Lake Tahoe, observed using a Secchi disk on a regular basis since the late 1960s, continues to be a sentinel metric of lake health. Water clarity is influenced by physical and biological processes and has declined in the five decades of monitoring, revealing differences between summer (June–September) and winter (December–March). This document summarizes key findings of a...

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are widely observed anthropogenic compounds found in water supplies worldwide and increasingly linked with adverse health effects in humans. In 2019, the West Virginia Legislature recognized the contamination risk to public source-water supplies posed by PFAS and passed a resolution that required a statewide PFAS study. The purpose of the...