Publications

Understanding how different crops use water over time is essential for planning and managing water allocation, water rights, and agricultural production. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of crop water use in the Central Valley of California using Landsat-based annual actual evapotranspiration (ETa) from 2008 to 2018 derived from the...

Sparse gauge networks in Sub-Saharan Africa limit our ability to identify changing precipitation extremes with in situ observations. Given the potential for satellite and satellite-gauge precipitation products to help, we investigate how daily gridded gauge and satellite products compare for seven core climate change precipitation indices. According to a new gauge-only product, the...

Accurate and timely information on the distribution of irrigated croplands is crucial to research on agriculture, water availability, land use, and climate change. While agricultural land use has been well characterized, less attention has been paid specifically to croplands that are irrigated, in part due to the difficulty in mapping and distinguishing irrigation in satellite imagery...

Multiple environmental stressors impact wildlife populations, but we often know little about their cumulative and combined influences on population outcomes. We generally know more about past effects than potential future impacts, and direct influences such as changes of habitat footprints than indirect, long-term responses in behavior, distribution, or abundance. Yet, an understanding...

There is an ever-increasing interest and need for accurate geo-registration of remotely sensed data products to a common global geometric reference. Although the geo-registration has improved significantly in the last decade, the lack of an accurate global ground reference dataset poses serious issues for data providers seeking to make geometrically stackable analysis ready data. The...

The evaluation of historical water use in the Upper Rio Grande Basin (URGB), United States and Mexico, using Landsat-derived actual evapotranspiration (ETa) from 1986 to 2015 is presented here as the first study of its kind to apply satellite observations to quantify long-term, basin-wide crop consumptive use in a large basin. The rich archive of Landsat imagery combined with the...

On a planet with more than 7 billion people, how do we identify the millions of drought-afflicted people who face a real threat of livelihood disruption or death without humanitarian assistance? Typically, these people are poor and heavily dependent on rainfed agriculture and livestock. Most live in Africa, Central America, or Southwest Asia. When the rains fail, incomes diminish while...

LANDFIRE (LF) National (2001) was the original product suite of the LANDFIRE program, which included Existing Vegetation Cover (EVC), Height (EVH), and Type (EVT). Subsequent refinements after feedback from data users resulted in updated products, referred to as LF 2001, that now served as LANDFIRE’s baseline datasets and are the basis for all subsequent LANDFIRE updates. These updates...

The Joint Agency Commercial Imagery Evaluation (JACIE) is a collaboration between five Federal agencies that are major users and producers of satellite land remote sensing data. In recent years, the JACIE group has observed ever-increasing numbers of remote sensing satellites being launched. This rapidly growing wave of new systems creates a need for a single reference for land remote...

An airborne lidar simulator creates a lidar point cloud from a simulated lidar system, flight parameters, and the terrain digital elevation model (DEM). At the basic level, the lidar simulator computes the range from a lidar system to the surface of a terrain using the geomatics lidar equation. The simple computation effectively assumes that the beam divergence is zero. If the beam spot...

The need to monitor change in sagebrush steppe is urgent due to the increasing impacts of climate change, shifting fire regimes, and management practices on ecosystem health. Remote sensing provides a cost effective and reliable method for monitoring change through time and attributing changes to drivers. We report an automated method of mapping rangeland fractional component cover over...

Landsat satellites have been operating since 1972, providing the longest continuous observation record of the Earth’s land surface. Over the past half century, the Landsat user community has grown exponentially, encompassing more diverse and evolving scientific research and operational uses. Understanding current and future user needs is crucial to informing the design of Landsat...