Monitoring Water and Agriculture

Water availability is a significant issue in Colorado. Melting mountain snowpack keeps rivers flowing, but low precipitation is typical for the Colorado Plateau region in the extreme west and for the Piedmont and plains regions in the east. Irrigation accounts for the vast majority of freshwater used in Colorado, sustaining corn, wheat, hay, sorghum, and fruit trees, among other products. Landsat has helped the Colorado Water Conservation Board in various ways: to identify irrigated and non-irrigated land, to estimate the amount of water consumed by irrigated crops, to identify crop types during growing seasons, and to identify areas of vegetation that consume high amounts of water. These types of data can assist public and private water management planning and enable more effective and precise water use (Serbina and Miller, 2014).

Sustainable Forest and Ecosystem Management

Colorado’s 24 million acres of forests contain deciduous and coniferous trees across a variety of landscapes. Monitoring the health of vast forest lands—especially in rugged mountains—can be difficult from the ground. But satellite imagery offers insights about the effects of disturbances like forest fires, insect outbreaks, and climate change, which affect wildlife habitat, carbon storage and much more. A recent study involving researchers from seven universities and The Nature Conservancy used Landsat imagery from 1997 to 2019 to map the presence and severity of tree mortality caused by several bark beetle species in the southern Rocky Mountains. Understanding patterns in historical disturbances help Coloradans anticipate the implications of future disturbances (Rodman and others, 2021).

Assessing Revegetation at Energy Sites

Outside of agriculture, Landsat can reveal vegetation patterns to help in effective environmental management, such as reducing the effects of invasive species or assessing potential wildfire fuels. One USGS study used Landsat imagery from 1984 to 2011 to assess how vegetation grew back on several hundred oil and gas pads across the Colorado Plateau after they were developed, capped, reclaimed, and abandoned. Understanding vegetation recovery at these sites, which vary in climate and soil conditions, can help guide energy development and land management decisions, including addressing areas where undesirable invasive species are likely to thrive (Waller and others, 2018).

Landsat—Critical Information Infrastructure for the Nation

Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing data source within Federal civilian agencies. Local, State, Tribal, and Federal agencies use Landsat to monitor and forecast a wide range of land surface phenomena. Information from Landsat contributes to day-to-day decisions on land, water, and resource use that protect life and property; safeguard the environment; advance science, technology, and education; support climate change resiliency; and grow the U.S. economy. Landsat’s imagery provides a landscape-level view of land surface, inland lake, and coastal processes, both natural and human-induced. Landsat enables us to better understand the scope, nature, and speed of change to the natural and built environment.

Businesses draw upon Landsat data to provide customer-specific applications to improve logistics, resource allocation, and investment decisions. Commercial space imaging firms leverage Landsat data to refine product offerings and support new information services. A 2017 USGS study determined the total annual economic benefit of Landsat data in the United States to be $2.06 billion, far surpassing its development and operating costs (Straub and others, 2019).

Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 provide 8-day repeat coverage of the Earth’s land surfaces. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the USGS are currently reviewing the findings from a joint Architecture Study Team, which will inform the design and implementation approach for Landsat Next, the follow-on mission to Landsat 9. Landsat 9 and its successors are planned to provide a sustainable, space-based system to extend the 50-year Landsat series of high-quality global land imaging measurements--the world’s longest time series of the Earth’s land surface. The long-term availability of consistent and accurate Landsat data, combined with a no-cost data policy, allows users to analyze extensive geographic areas and better understand and manage long-term trends in land surface change. New cloud computing and data analytics technologies use Landsat data in a wide range of decision-support tools for Government and industry. Much like global positioning systems and weather data, Landsat data are used every day to help us better understand our dynamic planet.

The long-term availability of consistent and accurate Landsat data, combined with a no-cost data policy, allows users to analyze extensive geographic areas and to better understand and manage long-term trends in land surface change. New cloud computing and data analytics technologies use Landsat data in a wide range of decision-support tools for Government and industry. Much like global positioning system and weather data, Landsat data are used every day to help us better understand our dynamic planet.