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Analysis Ready Data (ARD) is a recent concept in Earth observing remote sensing which encompasses many different initiatives by individual imagery providers and collaborative international organizations working towards easing/minimizing data preprocessing required by users. This allows users to spend more time on analysis and less time on downloading, formatting, and...

Understanding the factors that influence vegetation responses to disturbance is important because vegetation is the foundation of food resources, wildlife habitat, and ecosystem properties and processes. We integrated vegetation cover data derived from field plots and remotely sensed Landsat images in two focal areas over a 37‐yr period (1979–2016) to...

Medium spatial resolution satellite images are frequently used to characterize thematic land cover and a continuous field at both regional and global scales. However, high spatial resolution remote sensing data can provide details in landscape structures, especially in the urban environment. With upgrades to spatial resolution and spectral coverage for...

Invasive annual grasses are of concern in many areas of the Western United States because they tolerate resource variability and have high reproductive capacity, with propagules that are readily dispersed in disturbed areas like those created and maintained for energy development. Early-season invasive grasses “green up” earlier than the most...

The Upper Missouri River Headwaters Basin (36,400 km2) depends on its river corridors to support irrigated agriculture and world-class trout fisheries. We evaluated trends (1984-2016) in riparian wetness, an indicator of riparian condition, in peak irrigation months (June, July, August) for 158 km2 of riparian area across the basin using...

(Munson) Climate variability and change acting at broad scales can lead to divergent changes in plant production at local scales. Quantifying how production responds to variation in climate at local scales is essential to understand underlying ecological processes and inform land management decision-making, but has historically been limited in spatiotemporal...

Landsat satellites have been operating since 1972, providing a continuous global record of the Earth’s land surface. The imagery is currently available at no cost through the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). A previous USGS study estimated that Landsat imagery provided users an annual benefit of $2.19 billion in 2011, with...

Accurate monitoring of surface water location and extent is critical for the management of diverse water resource phenomena. The multi-decadal archive of Landsat satellite imagery is punctuated by missing data due to cloud cover during acquisition times, hindering the assembly of a continuous time series of inundation dynamics. This study...

First launched in 1972, the Landsat satellite sensors have provided the longest continuous record of high quality images of the Earth’s surface that are used in both civilian and military applications. The Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS) sensor was on-board Landsat-1 through Landsat-5. In fact, the MSS sensors provide the only...

Beaches and islands provide economic value to humans and critical habitat for breeding and foraging wildlife. These ecosystems, however, are being severely impacted by global climate change and sea level rise through increased erosion and frequency of inundation. The case study presented here aimed to document island loss in the...

Many efforts have been made to map developed impervious surface from remotely sensed information in the last two decades. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) to provide consistent land cover and change products for the Nation since 2001. Percent impervious surface area (ISA), one...

A unique, multi-tiered approach was applied to map crop-residue cover on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, USA. Field measurements of crop-residue cover were used to calibrate residue mapping using shortwave infrared (SWIR) indices derived from WorldView-3 imagery for an 8-km x 8-km footprint. The resulting map was then...

The Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) initiative uses temporally dense Landsat data and time series analyses to characterize landscape change in the United States from 1985 to present. LCMAP will be used to explain how past, present, and future landscape change affects society and natural systems. Here, we...

Understanding how different crops use water over time is essential for planning and managing water allocation, water rights, and agricultural production. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of crop water use in the Central Valley of California using Landsat-based annual actual evapotranspiration (ETa) from...

Accurate and timely information on the distribution of irrigated croplands is crucial to research on agriculture, water availability, land use, and climate change. While agricultural land use has been well characterized, less attention has been paid specifically to croplands that are...

There is an ever-increasing interest and need for accurate geo-registration of remotely sensed data products to a common global geometric reference. Although the geo-registration has improved significantly in the last decade, the lack of an accurate global ground reference dataset poses serious issues for data providers seeking to make geometrically stackable...

The evaluation of historical water use in the Upper Rio Grande Basin (URGB), United States and Mexico, using Landsat-derived actual evapotranspiration (ETa) from 1986 to 2015 is presented here as the first study of its kind to apply satellite observations to quantify long-term, basin-wide crop consumptive use in a large...

Conservation of montane meadows is a high priority for land and water managers given their critical role in buffering the effects of climate variability and their vulnerability to increasing temperatures and evaporative demands. Recent advances in cloud computing have provided new opportunities to examine ecological responses to climate variability over...

Daytime and nighttime thermal infrared observations acquired by the ASTER and MODIS instruments onboard the NASA Terra spacecraft have produced a dataset that can be used to map thermophysical properties across large regions, which have implications on surface processes, thermal environments and habitat suitability for desert species. ASTER scenes acquired...

The need to monitor change in sagebrush steppe is urgent due to the increasing impacts of climate change, shifting fire regimes, and management practices on ecosystem health. Remote sensing provides a cost effective and reliable method for monitoring change through time and attributing changes to drivers. We report an automated...

Satellite derived shorelines are extracted using the Google Earth Engine API for Landsat and Sentinel satellites from 1984 through 2018. These shorelines are evaluated against existing surveys and show satellite-derived breach shorelines are in good agreement with directly-observed shorelines and capture the trend of the Fire Island wilderness breach evolution....

Cropland extent maps are useful components for assessing food security. Ideally, such products are a useful addition to countrywide agricultural statistics since they are not politically biased and can be used to calculate cropland area for any spatial unit from an individual...

As part of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s (DOI) commitment to provide technical assistance to the Kenyan Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT), the U.S. Geological Survey, in collaboration with the DOI International Technical Assistance Program and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s regional mission in East Africa, created a high...

Surface debris covers much of the western portion of the McMurdo Ice Shelf and has a strong influence on the local surface albedo and energy balance. Differential ablation between debris-covered and debris-free areas creates an unusual heterogeneous surface of topographically low, high-ablation,...

Landsat 9 is a partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey that will continue the Landsat program’s critical role of repeat global observations for monitoring, understanding, and managing Earth’s natural resources. Since 1972, Landsat data have provided a unique resource for those who work...