Best Practices

This project develops an open-source toolkit for the consistent, automated assessment of accuracy and cartographic quality of generalized geospatial data. The toolkit will aid USGS and other stakeholders with the development and use of multiscale data and with associated decision-making.

Restoring ecosystems using native plant materials is a critical pursuit of federal land management agencies following natural disasters and disturbances. The Native Plant Seed Mapping Toolkit provides practitioners with quantitative data to support successful restoration outcomes.

The value of USGS tools and products can be assessed by collecting use metrics, user feedback, and examples of practical application. We will pilot an approach to assess the utility of two Coastal Change Hazards product releases and establish a guide for tracking the use and user experience of USGS products.

Develop a process-guided deep learning modeling framework to integrate high-frequency streamflow data from gages, discrete streamflow measurements, surface water presence/absence observations, and streamflow model outputs to improve hydrological predictions on small streams.

This project will share techniques developed in two AI/ML competitions run in Fall 2022, Automated Map Georeferencing, and Automated Map Feature Extraction with USGS stakeholders. We will develop a strategy to operationalize successful approaches, benefiting any activity that uses legacy map data.

We will develop and publish a stand-alone Python script to produce high-frequency and high-spatial resolution coastal vegetation maps that leverage new Planet 8-band 3m images, USGS CoNED topo-bathy DEMs, and 3DEP Height Above Ground data. These products will help improve forecasts of hurricane impacts.

In practice, e.g., in model applications, data are rarely complete without workflow code and workflows are often treated as software that include data. This project aims to understand current practice and recommend future practices that better fit the needs of reproducible workflows and models.

We will collate and publish existing datasets from collaborators and ingest them into a visualization app to help researchers with machine learning model-building and hypothesis-making. These data collation and app development methods could help other researchers increase their data accessibility.

We propose a summit for USGS and Tribal nation partners to share critical knowledge of past and future flooding. The summit will build on USGS research investigating changing flood conditions, improve access to flood information, and aid in building climate resilient communities.

This project leverages the USGS's photo archive and Structure from Motion algorithms to derive historical elevation and geomorphic data to catalyze a long-term landscape change analysis of a conservation area. We propose to create a best practices workflow and establish suitable accuracy metrics.

Wildfires are increasing across the western U.S., causing damage to ecosystems and communities. Addressing the fire problem requires understanding the trends and drivers of fire, yet most fire data is limited only to recent decades. Tree-ring fire scars provide fire records spanning 300-500 years, yet these data are largely inaccessible to potential users. Our project will deliver the newly compil

Drought is a major problem in the American Southwest that is expected to worsen under the effects of climate change. Currently, the Southwest Biological Science Center is monitoring the effects of drought with soil moisture probes in a range of ecosystems across an elevational gradient on the Colorado Plateau. These data are used in multiple studies to analyze the effects of drought on vegetation