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Continental-scale studies of western North America have attributed recent increases in annual area burned and fire size to a warming climate, but these studies have focussed on large fires and have left the issues of fire severity and ignition frequency unaddressed. Lightning ignitions, any of which could burn a large...

To estimate the Mt. Graham red squirrel (MGRS) population, personnel visit a proportion of middens each year to determine their occupancy (Snow in this vol.). The method results in very tight confidence intervals (high precision), but the accuracy of the population estimate is dependent upon knowing where all the middens...

Reduction in the area and volume of the two polar ice sheets is intricately linked to changes in global climate, and the resulting rise in sea level could severely impact the densely populated coastal regions on Earth. Antarctica is Earth's largest reservoir of glacial ice. Melting of the West Antarctic...

Basin characteristics have long been used to develop equations describing streamflow. In the past, flow equations used in West Virginia were based on a few hand-calculated basin characteristics. More recently, the use of a Geographic Information System (GIS) to generate basin characteristics from existing datasets has refined the process for...

This 30-meter data set represents land use and land cover for the conterminous United States for the 2001 time period. The data have been arranged into four tiles to facilitate timely display and manipulation within a Geographic Information System (see http://water.usgs.gov/GIS/browse/nlcd01-partition.jpg).The National Land Cover Data Set for 2001 was produced...

Moderate resolution satellite imagery traditionally has been thought to be inadequate for mapping vegetation at the species level. This has made comprehensive mapping of regional distributions of sensitive species, such as whitebark pine, either impractical or extremely time consuming. We sought to determine whether using a combination of moderate resolution...

This research addressed the temporal and spatial variation of soil moisture (SM) in a heterogeneous landscape. The research objective was to investigate soil moisture variation in eight homogeneous 30 by 30 m plots, similar to the pixel size of a Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) or Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+)...

Estimation of forest cover change is important for boreal forests, one of the most extensive forested biomes, due to its unique role in global timber stock, carbon sequestration and deposition, and high vulnerability to the effects of global climate change. We used time-series data from the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer...

Failure of the Scan Line Corrector (SLC) on the Landsat ETM+ sensor has had a major impact on many applications that rely on continuous medium resolution imagery to meet their objectives. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Cropland Data Layer (CDL) program uses Landsat imagery as the primary source...

The southern portion of the Atchafalaya Basin Floodway System (ABFS) is a large area (2,571 km2) in south central Louisiana bounded on the east and west sides by a levee system. The ABFS is a sparsely populated area that includes some of the Nation's most significant extents of bottomland hardwoods,...

The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) Operational Land Imager (OLI) is the successor to the Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) instrument and features a pushbroom architecture that is more geometrically stable than the whiskbroom scanner of the ETM+. As a tradeoff of this architecture selection, imagery must be...

EarthNow! displays live or recent acquisitions from the Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites as they pass over North America. When these satellites pass within range of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, data imagery is downloaded and displayed in near-real time. When the...

The USGS Landsat archive holds an unequaled 36-year record of the Earth's surface that is invaluable to climate change studies, forest and resource management activities, and emergency response operations. An aggressive effort is taking place to provide all Landsat imagery [scenes currently held in the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science...

The National Landsat Archive Production System (NLAPS) has been the primary processing system for Landsat data since U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS) started archiving Landsat data. NLAPS converts raw satellite data into radiometrically and geometrically calibrated products. NLAPS has historically used the Internal Calibrator...

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Proto-Flight Model (PFM), launched on December 18, 1999, aboard NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) Terra satellite has 20 reflective solar bands (RSB) with wavelengths ranging from 0.41 to 2.1 mum over a wide field of view (plusmn55deg). The Landsat 7 (L7) Enhanced Thematic Mapper...

To understand our planet at local, regional, national, and global scales, people need information about Earth's land surfaces and how they are changing. Land remote sensing is the key to gathering this information. Satellites that capture detailed images of Earth's continents, islands, and coastlines are and have been EROS' primary...

Declassified photographs from U.S. intelligence satellites provide an important worldwide addition to the public record of the Earth’s land surface. This imagery was released to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in accordance with Executive Order 12951 on February 23, 1995. The NARA...

The multispectral data from the Landsat 5 (L5) Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor provides the backbone of an extensive archive of moderate resolution Earth imagery. Even after more than 24 years of service, the L5 TM is still operational. Given the longevity of the instrument, the detectors have aged, and the...

The capabilities of the currently operational Landsat satellites may be lost before the launch of the follow-on Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), thus producing a gap in the Landsat data record and the National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data Archive (NSLRSDA). In anticipation of a gap, the Federal agencies responsible...

Evapotranspiration (ET) is an essential component of the water balance and a major consumptive use of irrigation water and precipitation on cropland. Numerous energy balance (EB) algorithms have been developed to make use of remote sensing data to estimate ET regionally. However, a review of different ET mapping algorithms shows...

2008 Ride The Rockies route on shaded-relief mosaic of USGS Landsat 7 satellite images. To download other USGS materials related to Ride The Rockies, go to http://www.cr.usgs.gov/rtr/index.htm...

The international land-cover community has been working with GEO since 2005 to build the foundations for land-cover observations as an integral part of a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The Group on Earth Observation (GEO) has provided the platform to elevate the societal relevance of land cover monitoring...

Reliable estimates of cropped area (CA) in developing countries with chronic food shortages are essential for emergency relief and the design of appropriate market-based food security programs. Satellite interpretation of CA is an effective alternative to extensive and costly field surveys, which fail to represent the spatial heterogeneity at the...

No abstract available....

Recently available satellite land cover land use (LCLU) and albedo data are used to study the impact of LCLU change from 1973 to 2000 on surface albedo and radiative forcing for 36 ecoregions covering 43% of the conterminous United States (CONUS). Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) snow-free broadband albedo values...