Opportunities by NSF Division

Seeking an energized intern to work with us to advance the science of wetland-water quality interactions in watersheds. Come and be a part of our interdisciplinary team to push science forward while learning about careers in the USGS. You can add your research capabilities and perspectives to our existing umbrella of studies and also learn new approaches, measurements, and modeling techniques.

Collaborate with developers of the state-of-the-art, open-source, community-code PyLith to add new features and use them to model complex earthquake or volcanic processes. This is your opportunity to expand your software development, numerical modeling, and geoscience skills while furthering your research and contributing to the broader community!

In an unprecedented large-scale mortality event, Florida has lost >90% of many coral species. This event is unusual due to its expansive spatial extent, the number of affected species (at least 21 scleractinian coral species), and severity of losses (> 95% for Dendrogyra cylindrus), effectively eliminating some species from the tract.

Biological productivity in the Gulf of Alaska is limited by availability of the micronutrient iron. Dust derived from Alaskan glacial flour and from Asian deserts, and ash from Alaskan volcanoes, episodically supply iron from the atmosphere. This internship would carry out studies on archived material from a variety of dust and ash samples to examine controls on the supply of this micronutrient.

Work with quantitative spatial wildlife ecologists to identify best practices for sampling rare and threatened carnivores using cutting edge statistical techniques. The results will be useful for sampling carnivore populations across the world. You will be stationed in beautiful northwest Montana in Glacier National Park.

How can our national streamgage network evolve to meet changing demands in the coming fifty years? This is an opportunity to explore the varied uses of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Streamgage Network and understand how it can be used to support water management across the country and how it can be more effectively designed.

As urban development continues to expand, the ecosystem services provided by the urban landscape will be increasingly important to human well-being. Join our interdisciplinary team to help us quantify the water quality services provided by urban stormwater management practices such as rain gardens, infiltration trenches, and detention ponds.

Much of this research is centered on animal or human-associated pathogens, the antimicrobial resistance potential of those pathogens, and the influence of these pathogens on recreational water quality, drinking-water quality, and water quality in agricultural and urban watersheds.

The goal of the project supported by the internship is to evaluate mineral assemblages in drill hole core collected from Yellowstone National Park using spectral methods, determine subsurface structures using electromagnetic methods, and to evaluate the distribution of rare earth elements and other trace metals associated with minerals using scanning electron microscopy and electron microprobe.

The USGS and the Smithsonian Institution have initiated the first in situ active aboveground and belowground warming experiment in a coastal wetland that is focused on wetland temperature responses and also examines the interaction between warming, elevated CO2, and inundation frequency on wetland resilience in the face of changes in global change drivers.

Plants and insects comprise a large portion of problematic invasive species. The success of these invasions largely depends on the outcomes of plant-insect interactions in which plants that escape herbivores may be more successful invaders, and herbivores that find adequate hosts have the opportunity to establish. This project will explore the dynamics of introduced plant or insect populations, or

Relict forests are becoming more common as as climates become hotter, drier and more saline. The first sign of threat to these forests is a chronic lack of seedling and sapling recruitment. This project will help pinpoint forests at risk to help in future management.