Unified Interior Regions

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Madison, Wisc., said today that two dead crows, found in the Chicago area tested positive for the West Nile Virus. Last week, dead crows found near Milwaukee also tested positive for the virus. So far this year, West Nile Virus has been identified in 20 states, the District of Columbia and in southern Ontario.

If the aquarium of brightly colored exotic fish with interesting names like angelfish, swordtail, glow-light tetra, hatchet fish and tire track eel that Aunt Tillie gave you for Christmas is rapidly becoming a burden, think twice before you dump the tank and destroy the evidence.

A new population of non-native Asian swamp eels, a highly adaptable predatory fish, has been found near the eastern border of Everglades National Park in the area of Homestead, Fla.

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