Search Results

The Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV), developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), capitalizes on the long temporal availability of Landsat imagery to identify burned areas across the conterminous United States (CONUS) (1984–2015). Adequate validation of such products is critical for their proper usage and interpretation. Validation of...

The U.S. Geological Survey has produced the Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) product for the conterminous United States (CONUS), which provides wall-to-wall annual maps of burned area at 30 m resolution (1984–2015). Validation is a critical component in the generation of such remotely sensed products. Previous efforts to...

The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) instrument is the thermal-band imager on the Landsat-8 platform. The initial onorbit calibration estimates of the two TIRS spectral bands indicated large average radiometric calibration errors, -0.29 and -0.51 W/m2 sr μm or -2.1K and -4.4K at 300K in Bands 10 and 11, respectively, as well...

Landsat time series data were used to characterize forest degradation in Lam Dong Province, Vietnam. We conducted three types of image change analyses using Landsat time series data to characterize the land cover changes. Our analyses concentrated on the timeframe of 1973–2014, with much emphasis on the latter part of...

In the USA, climate change is expected to have an adverse impact on slope stability in Alaska. However, to date, there has been limited work done in Alaska to assess if changes in slope stability are occurring. To address this issue, we used 30-m Landsat imagery acquired from 1984 to...

Wildfire behavior depends on the type, quantity, and condition of fuels, and the effect that bark beetle outbreaks have on fuels is a topic of current research and debate. Remote sensing can provide estimates of fuels across landscapes, although few studies have estimated surface fuels from remote sensing data. Here...

Spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) outbreaks are rapidly spreading throughout subalpine forests of the Rocky Mountains, raising concerns that altered fuel structures may increase the ecological severity of wildfires. Although many recent studies have found no conclusive link between beetle outbreaks and increased fire size or canopy mortality, few studies have...

The Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) is an optical multispectral push-broom sensor with a focal plane consisting of over 7000 detectors per spectral band. Each of the individual imaging detectors contributes one column of pixels to an image. Any difference in the response between neighboring detectors may result in...

Among the most pressing concerns of land managers in post-wildfire landscapes are the establishment and spread of invasive species. Land managers need accurate maps of invasive species cover for targeted management post-disturbance that are easily transferable across space and time. In this study, we sought to develop an iterative, replicable...

We present a fully automated and scalable algorithm for quantifying surface water inundation in wetlands. Requiring no external training data, our algorithm estimates sub-pixel water fraction (SWF) over large areas and long time periods using Landsat data. We tested our SWF algorithm over three wetland sites across North America, including...

The increase of tree density in forests of the American Southwest promotes extreme fire events, understory biodiversity losses, and degraded habitat conditions for many wildlife species. To ameliorate these changes, managers and scientists have begun planning treatments aimed at reducing fuels and increasing understory biodiversity. However, spatial variability in tree...

In the southwestern U.S., many riparian ecosystems have been altered by dams, water diversions, and other anthropogenic activities. This is particularly true of the Colorado River, where numerous dams and agricultural diversions have affected this water course, especially south of the U.S.–Mexico border. In the spring of 2014, 130 million...

Complete and accurate burned area data are needed to document patterns of fires, to quantify relationships between the patterns and drivers of fire occurrence, and to assess the impacts of fires on human and natural systems. Unfortunately, in many areas existing fire occurrence datasets are known to be incomplete. Consequently,...

Seasonal vegetation phenology can significantly alter surface albedo which in turn affects the global energy balance and the albedo warming/cooling feedbacks that impact climate change. To monitor and quantify the surface dynamics of heterogeneous landscapes, high temporal and spatial resolution synthetic time series of albedo and the enhanced vegetation index...

Lakes are a ubiquitous landscape feature in northern permafrost regions. They have a strong impact on carbon, energy and water fluxes and can be quite responsive to climate change. The monitoring of lake change in northern high latitudes, at a sufficiently accurate spatial and temporal resolution, is crucial for understanding...

Monitoring and mapping land cover changes are important ways to support evaluation of the status and transition of ecosystems. The Alaska National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2001 was the first 30-m resolution baseline land cover product of the entire state derived from circa 2001 Landsat imagery and geospatial ancillary data....

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management researchers often require detailed information regarding emergent marsh vegetation types (such as fresh, intermediate, brackish, and saline) for modeling habitat capacities and mitigation. In response, the U.S. Geological Survey in cooperation with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management produced a detailed change classification of...

A remote-sensing-based model to estimate evaporative fraction (EF) – the ratio of latent heat (LE; energy equivalent of evapotranspiration –ET–) to total available energy – from easily obtainable remotely-sensed and meteorological parameters is presented. This research specifically addresses the shortcomings of existing ET retrieval methods such as calibration requirements of...

Remote sensing-based field-scale evapotranspiration (ET) maps are useful for characterizing water use patterns and assessing crop performance. The relative impact of climate variability and water management decisions are better studied and quantified using historical data that are derived using a set of consistent datasets and methodology. Historical (1984–2014) Landsat-based ET maps were generated for...

When nature and humanity change Earth’s landscapes - through flood or fire, public policy, natural resources management, or economic development - the results are often dramatic and lasting.Wildfires can reshape ecosystems. Hurricanes with names like Sandy or Katrina will howl for days while altering the landscape for years. One growing...

Climate change effects on vegetation will likely be strong in the southwestern U.S., which is projected to experience large increases in temperature and changes in precipitation. Plant communities in the southwestern U.S. may be particularly vulnerable to climate change as the productivity of many plant species is strongly water-limited. This...

Clouds are a pervasive and unavoidable issue in satellite-borne optical imagery. Accurate, well-documented, and automated cloud detection algorithms are necessary to effectively leverage large collections of remotely sensed data. The Landsat project is uniquely suited for comparative validation of cloud assessment algorithms because the modular architecture of the Landsat ground...

The winter meeting of the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat Science Team (LST) was held January 10-12, 2017, at Boston University. LST co-chairs Tom Loveland [USGS’s Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS)—Senior Scientist], Jim Irons [NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)—Deputy Director, Earth Sciences Division], and Curtis Woodcock [Boston...

A partnership established between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) allows for USGS storage and redistribution of images acquired by the MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) on the European Union's Sentinel-2 satellite mission. The MSI data are acquired from a pair of satellites, Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B, which...

Executive SummaryThe use of Landsat satellite imagery for global agricultural monitoring began almost immediately after the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972, making agricultural monitoring one of the longest-standing operational applications for the Landsat program. More recently, Landsat imagery has been used in domestic agricultural applications as an input for...