Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center
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At the USGS EROS Center, we study land change and produce land change data products used by researchers, resource managers, and policy makers across the nation and around the world. We also operate the Landsat satellite program with NASA, and maintain the largest civilian collection of images of the Earth’s land surface in existence, including tens of millions of satellite images.
News
EROS Research Presented at AGU
The American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting takes place Dec. 10-14 in Washington, D.C. The work of the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center will be well-represented at the weeklong conference. More than half a dozen USGS EROS researchers will lead or participate in sessions, and EROS authors contributed to many others....
Post-fire Sagebrush Recovery Looks to Landsat Time Series Data for Solutions
When a wildfire rampages through a sagebrush domain, restoring the landscape’s natural vegetation afterward is often a dicey proposition. But now complicate that situation with soil-moisture-robbing drought either before or after the fire. What becomes the best restoration solution then?
EROS Workshop Offers First Look at Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection Products
The mapping and classification of land use and land cover has long been a primary duty for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and remotely-sensed data at the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center has served as the backbone of the Survey’s modern efforts.
In recent years, two advancements in remote sensing emerged that promise to revolutionize the field.
Publications
Using remote sensing to quantify ecosystem site potential community structure and deviation in the Great Basin, United States
The semi-arid Great Basin region in the Northwest U.S. is impacted by a suite of change agents including fire, grazing, and climate variability to which native vegetation can have low resilience and resistance. Assessing ecosystem condition in relation to these change agents is difficult due to a lack of a consistent and objective Site Potential (...
Rigge, Matthew B.; Homer, Collin G.; Wylie, Bruce K.; Gu, Yingxin; Shi, Hua; Xian, George Z.; Meyer, Debra K.; Bunde, Brett Spatiotemporal remote sensing of ecosystem change and causation across Alaska
Contemporary climate change in Alaska has resulted in amplified rates of press and pulse disturbances that drive ecosystem change with significant consequences for socio‐environmental systems. Despite the vulnerability of Arctic and boreal landscapes to change, little has been done to characterize landscape change and associated drivers across...
Pastick, Neal J.; Jorgenson, M. Torre; Goetz, Scott J.; Jones, Benjamin M.; Wylie, Bruce K.; Minsley, Burke J.; Genet, Hélène; Knight, Joseph F.; Swanson, David K.; Jorgenson, Janet C. Optimizing a remote sensing production efficiency model for macro-scale GPP and yield estimation in agroecosystems
Earth observation data are increasingly used to provide consistent eco-physiological information over large areas through time. Production efficiency models (PEMs) estimate Gross Primary Production (GPP) as a function of the fraction of photosynthetically active radiation absorbed by the canopy, which is derived from Earth observation....
Marshall, Michael; Tu, Kevin; Brown, Jesslyn