Albert G Morgan, III

My passion for water has grown into a career that has taken me from the shores of Lake Ontario to the lakes and rivers of the Pacific Northwest. 

My USGS career started in the NY Water Science Center in January of 2006 as a hydrologic technician working for the data section in Ithaca, NY; I am now a lead technician with the Cortland office, accommodating 18+ years’ experience. My introduction to USGS data collection began with a field trip in the southwestern part of the state that continued for several years, before field priorities were shifted to the north-central region, integrating surface water and water quality monitoring into a large-scale database. I started using Index-Velocity methods to compute surface water discharge during the summer of 2012 and now teach others those same methods. 

After graduating from SUNY Oneonta in 2001, I went to work with the Tompkins County Soil and Water District (TC-SWCD). While there, I was tasked with conducting streambank erosion surveys, pond site evaluations, and providing service for stream restoration projects. The pinnacle of my career with TC-SWCD was a project that restored several thousand feet of stream channel on Sixmile Creek that provided multiple landowners with infrastructure protection while also preserving the high quality of water, which was important as it (Sixmile Creek), at the time, was the primary drinking water source for the City of Ithaca. This stream restoration project was a collaborative effort between the Town of Caroline, the City of Ithaca, NYS DEC, US-ACOE, US-FWS, and TC-SWCD. 

While still in college I participated in an internship at SUNY Oneonta’s Biological Field Station on Otsego Lake, in Cooperstown, NY. My research at the field station focused on the zoo plankton community within Otsego Lake and its role in the trophic cascade the lake was experiencing at the time, and my work was published in the BFS Annual Report 2000.  

My devotion and appreciation for water started long before I had any working knowledge of it. The creek that ran through my family’s dairy farm in Pennsylvania was a mystery that stoked curiosity at a young age, from its sinuous course through forested meadows, to the creatures that depended upon it. My obsession with freshwater fishing facilitates my passion for water, and to this day, consider it a privilege to be able to work with a resource that I cherish.