USDA Blog

When most people think of bats, images of dark caves, vampires and Halloween come to mind. But actually, bats get a bad rap, and we often don’t know how important they are for controlling insects, pollinating plants, dispersing seeds and improving biodiversity. Many of our nation’s bats are facing...

Bats have quite the list of positive effects in our world, from the billions of dollars they save in pesticides to natural pollination and seed spreading. Bats eat about one-half of their body weight in insects each night. We need bats. In honor of our furry, flying mammal friends, consider pulling...

Much of the beauty in American agricultural landscapes is complemented by the trees in those landscapes. We depend on these tree’s products every day–from the paper our children use in school, to many of the fruits we eat, the wood burning in our fireplaces, and the wildlife habitat created by those...

People around the world manipulate ecosystems for their own purposes. It’s what you leave behind when you’re finished working or living in the area that determines whether the ecosystem survives or is irreparably harmed for future generations. For scientists like John Parrotta, national program...

Approximately 180 middle and high school students joined Smokey Bear, U.S. Forest Service staff and a host of other conservation-focused professionals from around the world for Student Day at the Hawaiʻi Convention Center in Honolulu. The students were invited to learn about natural resources...

It takes a special person to spend two weeks of hard-earned vacation time delicately slicing through layers of soil to unearth the past as part of an archeological dig or hand sawing logs for re-birth of a worn-down historical cabin. The U.S. Forest Service has a deep appreciation for the thousands...

The Great Lakes cover over 95,000 square miles and contain trillions of gallons of water. These vestiges of the last Ice Age define immense. But their greatness makes water quality monitoring difficult. In 2010, Titus Seilheimer, a US Forest Service research ecologist at the time, led a project...

When a little brown bat discovered near North Bend, Washington, in March tested positive for White-nose Syndrome or WNS, scientists had a lot of questions. The bat was found nearly 1,300 miles from the nearest confirmed case of WNS in eastern North America, so the most pressing question was about...

Changes in climate and extreme weather are already increasing challenges for forest ecosystems across the world. Many impacts are expected to remain into the future. This means forest managers, conservationists and woodland owners continually need to address climate change to ensure forests can...

The landscape modeling expertise Samuel Cushman provides as a research ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station is in demand worldwide as human-caused disturbances impact animal distribution, connectivity and survival. Whether it’s clouded leopards in Borneo, lions in...