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Shifts in the demographic and economic character of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) are driving patterns of land cover and land use change in the region. Such changes may have important consequences for ecosystem functioning. The objective of this paper is to quantify the trajectories and rates of change in...

A wide range of urban ecosystem studies, including urban hydrology, urban climate, land use planning, and resource management, require current and accurate geospatial data of urban impervious surfaces. We developed an approach to quantify urban impervious surfaces as a continuous variable by using multisensor and multisource datasets. Subpixel percent impervious...

Ten IKONOS images of different coral reef sites distributed around the world were processed to assess the potential of 4-m resolution multispectral data for coral reef habitat mapping. Complexity of reef environments, established by field observation, ranged from 3 to 15 classes of benthic habitats containing various combinations of sediments,...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) plans to procure data from a privately-owned and commercially-operated remote sensing system for the next Landsat Mission, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM).Data requirements are documented in an LDCM Data Specification. The specifications require delivery of data covering 250 Landsat scenes on a...

Changes in the area and volume of the polar ice sheets are intricately linked to changes in global climate, and the resulting changes in sea level may severely impact the densely populated coastal regions on Earth. Loss of the West Antarctic part of the Antarctic ice sheet alone could...

This report describes work done to implement an independent-components-analysis (ICA) -based blind unmixing algorithm on the Eastern Region Geography (ERG) Beowulf computer cluster. It gives a brief description of blind spectral unmixing using ICA-based techniques and a preliminary example of unmixing results for Landsat-7 Thematic Mapper multispectral imagery using a...

Multi-Resolution Land Characterization 2000 (MRLC 2000) is a second-generation federal consortium to create an updated pool of nation-wide Landsat 7 imagery, and derive a second-generation National Land Cover Database (NLCD 2000). This multi-layer, multisource database will include a suite of 30-meter resolution data that will serve as standardized ingredients for...

FIA plot data were used to assist in classifying forest land cover from Landsat imagery and relevant ancillary data in two regions of the U.S.: one around the Chesapeake Bay area and the other around Utah. The overall accuracies for the forest/nonforest classification were over 90 percent and about 80...

Accurate, current, and cost-effective fire fuel data are required by management and fire science communities for use in reducing wildland fire hazards over large areas. In this paper we present results of applying decision-tree techniques to mapping vegetation parameters (such as vegetation types and canopy structure classification) required for fire...

Environmental data are often utilized to guide interpretation of spectral information based on context, however, these are also important in deriving vegetation maps themselves, especially where ecological information can be mapped spatially. A vegetation classification procedure is presented which combines a classification of spectral data from Landsat‐5 Thematic Mapper (TM)...

Launched in April 1999, the Landsat-7 ETM+ instrument is in its fourth year of operation. The quality of the acquired calibrated imagery continues to be high, especially with respect to its three most important radiometric performance parameters: reflective band instrument stability to better than ??1%, reflective band absolute calibration to...

Relative radiometric responses for the thematic mapper (TM) band 6 data from Landsat-4 and Landsat-5 were analyzed, and an algorithm has been developed that significantly reduces the striping in Band 6 images due to detector mismatch. The TM internal calibration system as originally designed includes a DC restore circuit, which...

The Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) microwave satellite radiometer and its predecessor SMMR are primary sources of information for global sea ice and climate studies. However, comparisons of SSM/I, Landsat, AVHRR, and ERS-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) have shown substantial seasonal and regional differences in their estimates of sea ice...

The Florida Gap (FI-Gap) project provides an assessment of the degree to which native animal species and natural communities are or are not represented in existing conservation lands. Those species and communities not adequately represented in areas being managed for native species constitute 'gaps' in the existing network of conservation...

Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data were the basis in production of a statewide land cover data set for Wisconsin, undertaken in partnership with U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Gap Analysis Program (GAP). The data set contained seven classes comparable to Anderson Level I and 24 classes comparable to Anderson Level II/III....

Information on the rates of land-use and land-cover change is important in addressing issues ranging from the health of aquatic resources to climate change. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of information on land-use and land-cover change except at very local levels. We describe a strategy for estimating land-cover change across...

Nine atmospherically corrected Landsat Thematic Mapper images were used to generate mean normalized difference vegetation indices (NDVI) at 11 burn sites throughout a coastal Juncus roemerianus marsh in St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida. Time-since-burn, the time lapse from the date of burn to the date of image collection, was...

A new tasselled cap transformation based on Landsat 7 at-satellite reflectance was developed. This transformation is most appropriate for regional applications where atmospheric correction is not feasible. The brightness, greenness and wetness of the derived transformation collectively explained over 97% of the spectral variance of the individual scenes used in...

The National Vegetation Classification Standard (NVCS) was implemented at two US National Park Service (NPS) sites in Texas, the Padre Island National Seashore (PINS) and the Lake Meredith National Recreation Area (LM-NRA), to provide information for NPS oil and gas management plans. Because NVCS landcover classifications did not exist for...

Quantification of biophysical parameters is needed by terrestrial process modeling and other applications. A study testing the role of multispectral data for monitoring biophysical parameters was conducted over a network of grassland field sites in the Great Plains of North America. Grassland biophysical parameters [leaf area index (LAI), fraction of...

Satellite image maps have been produced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since shortly after the launch of the first Landsat satellite in 1972. Over the years, the use of image data to design and produce maps has developed from a manual and photographic process to one that incorporates geographic...

Enhanced false color images from mid-IR, near-IR (NIR), and visible bands of the Landsat thematic mapper (TM) are commonly used for visually interpreting land cover type. Described here is a technique for sharpening or fusion of NIR with higher resolution panchromatic (Pan) that uses a shift-invariant implementation of the discrete...

NASA developed the Earth Observing System (EOS) during the 1990'S. At the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), located at the USGS EROS Data Center, the EOS Data and Information System (EOSDIS) is required to support heritage missions as well as Landsat 7, Terra, and Aqua. The original...

Satellite imagery from the Landsat Thematic Mapper (nominal date 1992) was used to classify and map the location of irrigated land across the High Plains aquifer. The High Plains aquifer underlies 174,000 square miles in parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. The U.S....

Satellite imagery from the Landsat Thematic Mapper (nominal date 1992) was used to classify and map the location of irrigated land overlying the High Plains aquifer. The High Plains aquifer underlies 174,000 square miles in parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. The U.S....