Images

Dissected guano pellet showing antennae, eyes, and body fragments of midges. 

A landscape view of the "Devil's Backbone" near Loveland, CO.

A sunset in western Loveland, Colorado. 

Coal is loaded into trucks at the Trapper Mine in northwest Colorado.

An ideal ice core site is the highest, flattest glacier in a region. In 2016, a transect of 7-9 m ice cores was drilled on the Matthes Glacier, Juneau Icefield to determine if recent fires are affecting the glacier surface. (Photo: Lucas Foglia, used with permission)

Person taking data in a healthy dryland grassland with dark biocrusts between bunchgrasses and cacti in Utah.

Map showing sediment-hosted copper and porphyry copper deposits across the world.

Snowy road on the way to Rio Chama above Abiquiu Dam (08286500)

Lake Powell

This image of Devils Tower National Monument was created by combining elevation data and a digital photograph, captured over the landmark the same time by an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) in 2016.

Hydrologic technician Lindsay Hastings took this photo of the Rio Brazos near Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico during her first field trip as a streamgager with the New Mexico Water Science Center. Did you know that New Mexico was the birth place of streamgaging?

This was an early morning capture as the sun was rising at Schwabacher's Landing, Wyoming. The heavy cloud cover shielded the Grand Tetons from full view, but as we sat there, a small sliver of the mountains peeked through the clouds just long enough to take a few shots.

A shot taken from the walkway behind the Jackson Lake Lodge in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. 

USGS scientist David Fey walking through the Eureka Graben in the Silverton caldera complex.

View from Canyonlands Research Center. 

USGS scientist Jayne Belnap examines instrumentation to measure photosynthetic rates of biocrusts.

Many human activities can be unintentionally harmful to biological crusts. The biocrusts are no match for the compressional stress caused by footprints of livestock or people or tracks from vehicles.

On the Colorado Plateau, mature biocrusts are bumpy and dark-colored due to the presence of lichens, mosses, and high densities of cyanobacteria and other organisms. These organisms perform critical functions, such as fertilizing soils and increasing soil stability, therefore reducing dust.

On the Colorado Plateau, mature biocrusts are bumpy and dark-colored due to the presence of lichens, mosses, and high densities of cyanobacteria and other organisms. Disturbed biocrusts are lighter in color, looking more like the underlying sand than undisturbed ones, and are less capable of stabilizing soils or providing soil fertility.

This is a false-color-composite satellite image of Great Salt Lake, Utah, Sept 2016. Vegetation appears red in image.

USGS scientists created outdoor testing plots where large squares of biocrusts were exposed to different warming and precipitation factors over time.