Spatial variability and landscape controls of near-surface permafrost within the Alaskan Yukon River Basin
Neal J. Pastick, M. Torre Jorgenson, Bruce K. Wylie, Joshua R. Rose, Matthew Rigge, Michelle Ann Walvoord
2014, Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (119) 1244-1265
The distribution of permafrost is important to understand because of permafrost's influence on high-latitude ecosystem structure and functions. Moreover, near-surface (defined here as within 1 m of the Earth's surface) permafrost is particularly susceptible to a warming climate and is generally poorly mapped at regional scales. Subsequently, our objectives were to...
Mapping irrigated areas in Afghanistan over the past decade using MODIS NDVI
Md Shahriar Pervez, Michael Budde, James Rowland
2014, Remote Sensing of Environment (149) 155-165
Agricultural production capacity contributes to food security in Afghanistan and is largely dependent on irrigated farming, mostly utilizing surface water fed by snowmelt. Because of the high contribution of irrigated crops (> 80%) to total agricultural production, knowing the spatial distribution and year-to-year variability in irrigated areas is imperative to...
Evaluation of sensor types and environmental controls on mapping biomass of coastal marsh emergent vegetation
Kristin B. Byrd, Jessica L. O'Connell, Stefania Di Tommaso, Maggi Kelly
2014, Remote Sensing of Environment (149) 166-180
There is a need to quantify large-scale plant productivity in coastal marshes to understand marsh resilience to sea level rise, to help define eligibility for carbon offset credits, and to monitor impacts from land use, eutrophication and contamination. Remote monitoring of aboveground biomass of emergent wetland vegetation will help address...
Tracking change over time: River flooding
Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey
2014, General Information Product 133-A
Landsat satellites have been capturing images of Earth from space since 1972. These images provide a long-term record of natural and human-induced changes on the global landscape. Comparing images from multiple years reveals slow and subtle changes as well as rapid and devastating ones. Landsat images are available from the...
Local-area-enhanced, 2.5-meter resolution natural-color and color-infrared satellite-image mosaics of the Farah mineral district in Afghanistan
Philip A. Davis
2014, Data Series 709-FF
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, prepared databases for mineral-resource target areas in Afghanistan. The purpose of the databases is to (1) provide useful data to ground-survey crews for use in performing detailed assessments of the...
Local-area-enhanced, 2.5-meter resolution natural-color and color-infrared satellite-image mosaics of the Ghazni2 mineral district in Afghanistan
Philip A. Davis
2014, Data Series 709-EE
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, prepared databases for mineral-resource target areas in Afghanistan. The purpose of the databases is to (1) provide useful data to ground-survey crews for use in performing detailed assessments of the...
Local-area-enhanced, 2.5-meter resolution natural-color and color-infrared satellite-image mosaics of the Ghazni1 mineral district in Afghanistan
Philip A. Davis
2014, Data Series 709-DD
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Defense Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, prepared databases for mineral-resource target areas in Afghanistan. The purpose of the databases is to (1) provide useful data to ground-survey crews for use in performing detailed assessments of the...
Landsat-8: Science and product vision for terrestrial global change research
David P. Roy, M.A. Wulder, Thomas R. Loveland, C. E. Woodcock, R. G. Allen, M. C. Anderson, D. Helder, J. R. Irons, D.M. Johnson, R. Kennedy, T. A. Scambos, Crystal B. Schaaf, J. R. Schott, Y. Sheng, E. F. Vermote, A.S. Belward, R. Bindschadler, W.B. Cohen, F. Gao, J. D. Hipple, Patrick Hostert, J. Huntington, C.O. Justice, A. Kilic, Valeriy Kovalskyy, Z. P. Lee, Leo Lymburner, J. G. Masek, Joel McCorkel, Y. Shuai, R. Trezza, James Vogelmann, R.H. Wynne, Z. Zhu
2014, Remote Sensing of Environment (145) 154-172
Landsat 8, a NASA and USGS collaboration, acquires global moderate-resolution measurements of the Earth's terrestrial and polar regions in the visible, near-infrared, short wave, and thermal infrared. Landsat 8 extends the remarkable 40 year Landsat record and has enhanced capabilities including new spectral bands in the blue and cirrus cloud-detection portion...
Change in the length of the southern section of the Chandeleur Islands oil berm, January 13, 2011, through September 3, 2012
Nathaniel G. Plant, Kristy K. Guy
2014, Open-File Report 2013-1303
On April 20, 2010, an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig drilling at the Macondo Prospect site in the Gulf of Mexico resulted in a marine oil spill that continued to flow through July 15, 2010. One of the affected areas was the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, which consists...
Landsat Surface Reflectance Climate Data Records
Water Resources Division, U.S. Geological Survey
2014, Fact Sheet 2013-3117
Landsat Surface Reflectance Climate Data Records (CDRs) are high level Landsat data products that support land surface change studies. Climate Data Records, as defined by the National Research Council, are a time series of measurements with sufficient length, consistency, and continuity to identify climate variability and change. The U.S. Geological...
Land cover characterization and mapping of South America for the year 2010 using Landsat 30 m satellite data
Chandra Giri, Jordan Long
2014, Remote Sensing (6) 9494-9510
Detailed and accurate land cover and land cover change information is needed for South America because the continent is in constant flux, experiencing some of the highest rates of land cover change and forest loss in the world. The land cover data available for the entire continent are too coarse...
Detecting emergence, growth, and senescence of wetland vegetation with polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data
Alisa L. Gallant, Shannon G. Kaya, Lori White, Brian Brisco, Mark F. Roth, Walter J. Sadinski, Jennifer Rover
2014, Water (6) 694-722
Wetlands provide ecosystem goods and services vitally important to humans. Land managers and policymakers working to conserve wetlands require regularly updated information on the statuses of wetlands across the landscape. However, wetlands are challenging to map remotely with high accuracy and consistency. We investigated the use of multitemporal polarimetric synthetic...
Use of multi-sensor active fire detections to map fires in the United States: the future of monitoring trends in burn severity
Joshua J. Picotte, Michael Coan, Stephen M. Howard
2014, Conference Paper, Proceedings: Wildland fire in the Appalachians: Discussions among managers and scientists. General Technical Report SRS-199
The effort to utilize satellite-based MODIS, AVHRR, and GOES fire detections from the Hazard Monitoring System (HMS) to identify undocumented fires in Florida and improve the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) mapping process has yielded promising results. This method was augmented using regression tree models to identify burned/not-burned pixels...
Utilizing multi-sensor fire detections to map fires in the United States
Stephen M. Howard, Joshua J. Picotte, Michael Coan
2014, Conference Paper, The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XL-1,
In 2006, the Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS) project began a cooperative effort between the US Forest Service (USFS) and the U.S.Geological Survey (USGS) to map and assess burn severity all large fires that have occurred in the United States since 1984. Using Landsat imagery, MTBS is mandated to...
Landsat Science Team meeting — First Landsat 8 evaluations
Thomas R. Loveland, Michael A. Wulder, James R. Irons
2014, The Earth Observer (26) 24-28
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)-NASA Landsat Science Team (LST) met at the USGS’ Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center near Sioux Falls, SD, from October 29-31, 2013. All meeting presentations can be downloaded from landsat.usgs.gov/science_LST_October_29_31_2013.php....
Centralized mission planning and scheduling system for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission
Alicia Kavelaars, Assaf M. Barnoy, Shawna Gregory, Gonzalo Garcia, Cesar Talon, Gregory Greer, Jason Williams, Vicki Dulski
2014, Conference Paper, SpaceOps 2014 Conference
Satellites in Low Earth Orbit provide missions with closer range for studying aspects such as geography and topography, but often require efficient utilization of space and ground assets. Optimizing schedules for these satellites amounts to a complex planning puzzle since it requires operators to face issues such as discontinuous ground...
Detecting the influence of best management practices on vegetation near ephemeral streams with Landsat data
Matthew B. Rigge, Alexander Smart, Bruce K. Wylie, Kendall de Van Kamp
2014, Rangeland Ecology and Management (67) 1-8
Various best management practices (BMPs) have been implemented on rangelands with the goals of controlling nonpoint source pollution, reducing the impact of livestock in ecologically important riparian areas, and improving grazing distribution. Providing off-stream water sources to livestock in pastures, cross-fencing, and rotational grazing are common rangeland BMPs that have...
Monitoring conterminous United States (CONUS) land cover change with Web-Enabled Landsat Data (WELD)
M.C. Hansen, Alexey Egorov, P.V. Potapov, S.V. Stehman, A. Tyukavina, S.A. Turubanova, David P. Roy, S.J. Goetz, Thomas R. Loveland, J. Ju, A. Kommareddy, Valeriy Kovalskyy, C. Forsyth, T. Bents
2014, Remote Sensing of Environment (140) 466-484
Forest cover loss and bare ground gain from 2006 to 2010 for the conterminous United States (CONUS) were quantified at a 30 m spatial resolution using Web-Enabled Landsat Data available from the USGS Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) (http://landsat.usgs.gov/WELD.php). The approach related multi-temporal WELD metrics and expert-derived...
Landsat: Sustaining earth observations beyond Landsat 8
Francis P. Kelly, Thomas M. Holm
2014, Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing (80) 15-15
The Landsat series of Earth-observing satellites began 41-years ago as a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) of the Department of the Interior (DOI) and The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For the past 41 years, Landsat satellites and associated U.S. Government ground processing, distribution, and archiving systems...
Actual evapotranspiration (water use) assessment of the Colorado River Basin at the Landsat resolution using the operational simplified surface energy balance model
Ramesh K. Singh, Gabriel B. Senay, Naga Manohar Velpuri, Stefanie Bohms, Scott Russell L, James P. Verdin
2014, Remote Sensing (6) 233-256
Accurately estimating consumptive water use in the Colorado River Basin (CRB) is important for assessing and managing limited water resources in the basin. Increasing water demand from various sectors may threaten long-term sustainability of the water supply in the arid southwestern United States. We have developed a first-ever basin-wide actual...
A manual for remote sensing of Maine lake clarity
Ian M. McCullough, Cyndy Loftin, Steven A. Sader
2013, Technical Bulletin of the Maine Agricultural & Forest Experiment Station 207
The purpose of this manual is to support use of satellite-based remote sensing for statewide lake water-quality monitoring in Maine. The authors describe step-by-step methods that combine Landsat and MODIS satellite data with field-collected Secchi disk data for statewide assessment of lake water clarity. Landsat can be simultaneously used to...
Spatiotemporal variation in range-wide Golden-cheeked Warbler habitat
Adam Duarte, Jennifer Jensen, Jeffrey S. Hatfield, Floyd Weckerly
2013, Ecosphere (4)
Habitat availability ultimately limits the distribution and abundance of wildlife species. Consequently, it is paramount to identify where wildlife habitat is and understand how it changes over time in order to implement large scale wildlife conservation plans. Yet, no work has quantified the degree of change in range-wide breeding habitat...
Landsat imagery reveals declining clarity of Maine’s lakes during 1995-2010
Ian M. McCullough, Cynthia S. Loftin, Steven A. Sader
2013, Freshwater Science (32) 741-752
Water clarity is a strong indicator of regional water quality. Unlike other common water-quality metrics, such as chlorophyll a, total P, or trophic status, clarity can be accurately and efficiently estimated remotely on a regional scale. Satellite-based remote sensing is useful in regions with many lakes where traditional field-sampling techniques may...
Users, uses, and value of Landsat satellite imagery: results from the 2012 survey of users
Holly M. Miller, Leslie A. Richardson, Stephen R. Koontz, John Loomis, Lynne Koontz
2013, Open-File Report 2013-1269
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). Social scientists at the USGS Fort Collins Science Center conducted an extensive survey in early 2012 to explore who...
An approach for characterizing the distribution of shrubland ecosystem components as continuous fields as part of NLCD
George Z. Xian, Collin G. Homer, Debbie Meyer, Brian J. Granneman
2013, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (86) 136-149
Characterizing and quantifying distributions of shrubland ecosystem components is one of the major challenges for monitoring shrubland vegetation cover change across the United States. A new approach has been developed to quantify shrubland components as fractional products within National Land Cover Database (NLCD). This approach uses remote sensing data and...
