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Landsat data have enabled continuous global monitoring of both human-caused and other land cover disturbances since 1972. Recently degraded performance and intermittent service of the Landsat 7 and Landsat 5 sensors, respectively, have raised concerns about the condition of global Earth observation programs. However, Landsat imagery is still useful for...

High-latitude ecosystems are exposed to more pronounced warming effects than other parts of the globe. We develop a technique to monitor ecological changes in a way that distinguishes climate influences from disturbances. In this study, we account for climatic influences on Alaskan boreal forest performance with a data-driven model. We...

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...

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...

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...

Land cover is a critical component of the Earth system, infl uencing land-atmosphere interactions, greenhouse gas fl uxes, ecosystem health, and availability of food, fi ber, and energy for human populations. The recent Integrated Global Observations of Land (IGOL) report calls for the generation of maps documenting global land cover...

Healthy riparian ecosystems in arid and semi-arid regions exhibit shifting patterns of vegetation in response to periodic flooding. Their conditions also depend upon the amount of grazing and other human uses. Taking advantage of these system properties, we developed and tested an approach that utilizes historical Landsat data to track changes in the patterns of greenness (Normalized Difference...

The Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS-P6), also called ResourceSat-1, was launched in a polar sun-synchronous orbit on October 17, 2003. It carries three sensors: the highresolution Linear Imaging Self-Scanner (LISS-IV), the mediumresolution Linear Imaging Self-Scanner (LISS-III), and the Advanced Wide-Field Sensor (AWiFS). These three sensors provide images of different resolutions...

Aim We aimed to estimate the present extent of tsunami-affected mangrove forests and determine the rates and causes of deforestation from 1975 to 2005.Location Our study region covers the tsunami-affected coastal areas of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka in Asia.Methods We interpreted time-series Landsat data...

Accurate and reliable information on the spatial distribution of mangrove species is needed for a wide variety of applications, including sustainable management of mangrove forests, conservation and reserve planning, ecological and biogeographical studies, and invasive species management. Remotely sensed data have been used for such purposes with mixed results. Our...

By using both high-resolution orthoimagery and medium-resolution Landsat satellite imagery with other geospatial information, several land surface parameters including impervious surfaces and land surface temperatures for three geographically distinct urban areas in the United States – Seattle, Washington, Tampa Bay, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada, are obtained. Percent impervious surface...

Over the past 350 years, the eastern half of the United States experienced extensive land cover changes. These began with land clearing in the 1600s, continued with widespread deforestation, wetland drainage, and intensive land use by 1920, and then evolved to the present-day landscape of forest regrowth, intensive agriculture, urban...

Vegetation growth and community composition in semi-arid environments is determined by water availability and carbon assimilation mechanisms specific to different plant types. Disturbance also impacts vegetation productivity and composition dependent on area affected, intensity, and frequency factors. In this study, a new spatially explicit ecosystem model is presented for the...

Remote sensing techniques have been shown effective for large-scale damage surveys after a hazardous event in both near real-time or post-event analyses. The paper aims to compare accuracy of common imaging processing techniques to detect tornado damage tracks from Landsat TM data. We employed the direct change detection approach using...

We describe newly developed remote sensing tools to map the localized occurrences and regional distribution of the marsh dieback in coastal Louisiana (Fig. 1). As a final goal of our research and development, we identified what spectral features accompanied the onset of dieback and could be directly linked to the...

Since July 2003, Landsat-7 ETM+ has been operating without the scan line corrector (SLC), which compensates for the forward motion of the satellite in the imagery acquired. Data collected in SLC-off mode have gaps in a systematic wedge-shaped pattern outside of the central 22 km swath of the imagery; however,...

Satellite image-based mapping of tropical forests is vital to conservation planning. Standard methods for automated image classification, however, limit classification detail in complex tropical landscapes. In this study, we test an approach to Landsat image interpretation on four islands of the Lesser Antilles, including Grenada and St. Kitts, Nevis and...

Urban development has expanded rapidly in Las Vegas, Nevada of the United States, over the last fifty years. A major environmental change associated with this urbanization trend is the transformation of the landscape from natural cover types to increasingly anthropogenic impervious surface. This research utilizes remote sensing data from both...

MODIS active fire data offer new information about global fire patterns. However, uncertainties in detection rates can render satellite-derived fire statistics difficult to interpret. We evaluated the MODIS 1??km daily active fire product to quantify detection rates for both Terra and Aqua MODIS sensors, examined how cloud cover and fire...

From the Landsat program's inception in 1972 to the present, the earth science user community has benefited from a historical record of remotely sensed data. The multispectral data from the Landsat 5 (L5) Thematic Mapper (TM) sensor provide the backbone for this extensive archive. Historically, the radiometric calibration procedure for...

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...

A methodology for long-term radiometric cross-calibration between the Terra Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat 7 (L7) Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) sensors was developed. The approach involves calibration of near-simultaneous surface observations between 2000 and 2007. Fifty-seven cloud-free image pairs were carefully selected over the Libyan desert for...

Initiated in 1972, the Landsat program has provided a continuous record of earth observation for 35 years. The assemblage of Landsat spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, over a reasonably sized image extent, results in imagery that can be processed to represent land cover over large areas with an amount of spatial...

Remote sensing of a natural disaster's damage offers an exciting backup and/or alternative to traditional means of on-site damage assessment. Although necessary for complete assessment of damage areas, ground-based damage surveys conducted in the aftermath of natural hazard passage can sometimes be potentially complicated due to on-site difficulties (e.g., interaction...

The Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) has been the workhorse of the Landsat system. Launched in 1984, it continues collecting data through the time frame of this paper. Thus, it provides an invaluable link to the past history of the land features of the Earth's surface, and it becomes imperative to...