Land Cover

The sagebrush biome is one of the largest ecosystems in North America. Encompassing nearly one-third of the continental U.S., it provides critical resources for millions of Americans and a home for hundreds of plants and animal species in the West. Natural resource management in sagebrush ecosystems can be complex, and science can support management decisions by providing knowledge and tools to...

Wildlife movement and distribution can be influenced by local conditions like topography and landscape features, and the distances within which species respond to their landscape – scales of effect – can vary over space and time. We are estimating scales of effect for wildlife population trends to help land managers determine the distance within which wildlife will respond to landscape change.

The USGS Southwest Biological Science Center is coordinating the Southwest Fire Innovation Landscape Network to prepare fire and natural resource managers for rapidly changing fire landscapes by conducting research and building science-management partnerships. The network develops advanced tools and technologies to assess fuel loads and the effectiveness of fuel treatments, understand wildfire...

The USGS is collaborating with researchers from other agencies, academia, and industry to predict coastal impacts from hurricanes. The results from this study will better inform coastal morphological change models, which will lead to improved hurricane impact projections.

Providing accuracy metrics for a land cover map takes some work. But there’s poetry and story involved, too.

Posters covered a wide range of topics as local graduate students and EROS scientists shared their work in the EROS atrium.

The next generation of USGS land cover mapping is here. Annual NLCD provides land cover data of the U.S. every year back to 1985.

The next step for two strong land cover products at USGS EROS is to combine them to create something even better.

In contrast to the discrete land use and land cover classes, land productivity is a continuous variable, which represents land cover through vegetation density and vigor. Land productivity can indicate the land’s ability to support and sustain life and is useful for identifying land degradation. A common measure of land productivity is derived from time series of the Normalized Difference...

West Africa’s climate is controlled by the interaction of two air masses, the influence of which varies throughout the year with the north-south movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Hot, dry continental air masses originating from the high pressure system above the Sahara Desert give rise to dusty Harmattan winds over most of West Africa from November to February. In summer...

With a 2015 population of 367 million (UN, 2015), West Africa is home to 5 percent of the world’s population. This is a five-fold increase in population since 1950, when 73 million people lived in the region, which makes West Africa the fastest growing of any of the world’s regions. For comparison, the world population has increased less than three-fold during the same time period. The young age...

Changes in land use and land cover result from a myriad of factors acting on the land surface.