Resource Mapping and Monitoring

Water is one of our most valuable natural resources and understanding how it’s used is essential for managing it wisely. Scientists at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center use satellite data to estimate how much water is lost from the land through evapotranspiration (ET)—the combined effect of evaporation from soil and water surfaces and transpiration from plants. These...

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center National Land Cover Database team in collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has produced the most comprehensive remote-sensing based quantification of western United States shrublands to date.

Wetlands purify and store our water, process carbon and nutrients and serve a crucial role in the life cycle of a wide range of flora and fauna. Wetland disturbance from urban development or agriculture can alter the natural flow of runoff and increase the risk for flooding.

Landscapes of West Africa: A Window on a Changing World is an atlas and unique dataset that uses time-series satellite image data and field-based photography to tell the story of wide-ranging land change across 17 countries. EROS scientists selected the years 1975, 2000 and 2013 to characterize the landscapes and create the product, which represents the broadest effort to map the region in history...

Scientists at EROS look at local and global drivers of land-use change to project how different scenarios will impact and change landscapes. Using the FOREcasting SCEnarios of Land-use Change (FORE-SCE) modeling framework provides spatially explicit projections of future land-use and land-cover change.

The Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) and Applications project at EROS offers information used for a range of applications analysis needed for climate change analysis.