Unified Interior Regions

USGS scientists from the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, the National Wetlands Research Center and the Florida and Caribbean Science Center are gearing up to assess Hurricane Floyd damage to wildlife and habitat from Florida to Maine.

Wildfires have long played a key role in structuring ecosystems and plant communities in the southeastern United States. From the coastal prairie of Texas and Louisiana to the marshes and pinelands of Florida, many native species have adapted to a natural regime of frequent wildfire caused by lightning strikes.

USGS scientists, managers and experts from a diverse spectrum of scientific disciplines are on high alert Friday as Hurricane Dennis seems poised to make landfall along the southeastern coast of the United States sometime this weekend.

From the large, open-air pens where they have spent the past two weeks, eight young whooping cranes survey their surroundings. The rural, central Florida landscape of open prairie, brush, and marshlands stretches away as far as the birds can see, though only a few tens of miles separate the Kissimmee release site from the metropolitan sprawl of Orlando.

A century of alterations by humans to the Everglades ecosystem has lowered water levels and changed Everglades plant communities more than what would be expected from natural climatic changes alone over the last 2,000 years, according to scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. 

Heavy rainfall and flooding prompted an emergency response from USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) engineers and field technicians to keep stream gages operational during and after Hurricane Georges. Personnel from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are working to secure gages threatened by rising rivers and streams or damaged by the storm. Some gaging stations monitored by the USGS are used

...Initial concerns about severe flooding give way to thoughts of coasts and ecosystems.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is once again faced with the ominous task of preparing to monitor the effects of a potentially damaging hurricane, Georges, to the southeast coast of the United States

The Asian swamp eel, a non-native fish, has been found in canals, ditches, streams and ponds near Tampa and Miami, Fla. 

Due to heavy rains pelting eastern Massachusetts in recent days, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) field crews have been leaning precariously over the sides of bridges throughout the region to obtain accurate measurements of the amount (discharge) and height (stage) of water in swollen streams.

Water quality is generally good in the Georgia-Florida Coastal Plain but has been adversely affected by agricultural and urban land uses in some areas, according to the results of a five-year investigation by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).