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.

A minor earthquake, preliminary magnitude 3.9 according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), occurred in the northern part of Arkansas at 9:29 p.m.

More than 100 scientists will converge on the Cajundome in Lafayette, La., Nov. 2-4 to share the latest technologies used in studying everything from hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico to grizzly bears in Yellowstone National Park. They are participants in the U.S. Geological Survey’s symposium, "BioGeo99: Applications of Geospatial Technology to Biological Sciences."

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.

Gaye S. Farris of Carencro, La., is the new national secretary of the National Association of Government Communicators, a national professional network of federal, state and local government employees who disseminate information within and outside government.

From the drastic impacts of major floods and droughts to more gradual shifts in channel, sandbar and floodplain habitats, large river systems such as the Missouri are always changing. Over the past century human activities also have caused physical and biological changes in such rivers.

The mysterious brain disease responsible for the deaths of bald eagles and American coots in Arkansas has now been found in two species of ducks discovered dead at Woodlake, North Carolina, and in bald eagles and coots from three other southeastern states.

Nutrients from the Mississippi River Basin are believed to be responsible, at least in part, for the large hypoxic zone that develops on the Louisiana-Texas shelf in the Gulf of Mexico each summer, according to Don Goolsby, a hydrologist with the U.S.Geological Survey in Denver, Colo.

Effective immediately, the Environmental and Contaminants Research Center, an environmental research facility of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Biological Resources Division (Central Region) located in Columbia, MO, was re-named the Columbia Environmental Research Center (CERC).

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

Aerial flights on Tuesday, two days after Hurricane Georges hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, revealed what one scientist called the worst damage to the Chandeleur Islands that he had seen in more than a decade.