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US Geological Survey website screenshot

US Geological Survey

The US Geological Survey is a scientific agency of the United States government that conducts research on the natural resources, natural hazards, and environmental health of the United States. The USGS is responsible for monitoring and assessing the country's water, energy, mineral, and biological resources, as well as investigating geological hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides, and floods. USGS provides a broad portfolio of public REST APIs covering earthquake data, water resources, geomagnetism, mapping, seismic design, and scientific data catalogs - all available without cost as US Government works.

agent ready

Limited machine-readable signal and partial portal coverage — documentation a human can read, but little a machine or agent can consume without scraping.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles US Geological Survey the way a machine reads it — 26 machine-readable artifacts across 12 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — US Geological Survey scores 43.7/100 (thin), with a separate agent-readiness read of 48/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
Composite quality — 43.7/100 · thin
Contract Quality 14.7 / 25
Developer Ergonomics 2.2 / 20
Commercial Clarity 5.8 / 20
Operational Transparency 3.4 / 13
Governance 8.8 / 12
Discoverability 8.8 / 10
Agent readiness — 48/100 · agent ready
Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18
Agentic Access Contract 15 / 15
MCP Server 0 / 12
Machine-Readable Auth 10 / 10
Idempotency 0 / 9
Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8
Request/Response Examples 0 / 7
Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7
Typed Event Surface 0 / 6
Agent Skills 0 / 5
Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4
Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

How we profile US Geological Survey

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for US Geological Survey. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 12

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

USGS ScienceBase Catalog API

The USGS ScienceBase Catalog API provides access to USGS scientific data management infrastructure, enabling upload, documentation, sharing, and dynamic data services for USGS r...

USGS Geomagnetism Web Service

The USGS Geomagnetism Web Service provides programmatic access to geomagnetic data collected by USGS magnetic observatories across the United States and territories, supporting ...

USGS Seismic Design Data Web Services

The USGS Seismic Design Data Web Services provide parameter values from seismic design reference documents for building and infrastructure design, supporting compliance with ASC...

USGS National Map Services

The USGS National Map services provide geospatial data and elevation products via OGC web services, REST APIs, and download services covering topographic data, imagery, hydrogra...

US Geological Survey Collections API

OGC API collection discovery

US Geological Survey Continuous Values API

Real-time and historical continuous sensor measurements

US Geological Survey Daily Values API

Daily summary water data

US Geological Survey Earthquakes API

Earthquake catalog query and count operations

US Geological Survey Field Measurements API

Physically measured values from site visits

US Geological Survey Metadata API

API metadata and discovery operations

US Geological Survey Monitoring Locations API

Geographic and metadata for USGS monitoring stations

US Geological Survey Time Series Metadata API

Metadata about time series observations

Scroll within the panel for all 12 ·

Open Collections 2

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Us Geological Survey Context

22 classes · 6 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

US Geological Survey API Rules

5 rules · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

US Geological Survey API Rules

10 rules · 2 errors · 4 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 1

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

USGS Earthquake Feature

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

JSON Structure 1

JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.

JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.

Usgs Earthquake Feature Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Examples 1

Real request and response payloads are what turn a spec from abstract into obvious — and they're one of the twelve things an agent needs to call an API correctly on the first try.

Example request and response payloads for these APIs.

Security Posture 2

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Us Geological Survey Authentication

apiKey · 2 schemes

SECURITY

Us Geological Survey Domain Security

TLSv1.3 · HSTS · DNSSEC · DMARC

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Us Geological Survey Agentic Access

13 operations

13 operations · 0 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for US Geological Survey — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

Build 1

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

Company 1

The organization behind the API

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/us-geological-survey · machine-readable index on apis.io