Publications

The ecoregions of the Middle Atlantic Coastal Plain, Southeastern Plains, Piedmont, and Blue Ridge provide a continuum of land cover from the Atlantic Ocean to the highest mountains in the East. From 1973 to 2000, each ecoregion had a unique mosaic of land covers and land cover changes. The forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains provided amenity lands. The Piedmont forested area declined...

Long-term climate data records (CDR) are often constructed using observations made by multiple Earth observing sensors over a broad range of spectra and a large scale in both time and space. These sensors can be of the same or different types operated on the same or different platforms. They can be developed and built with different technologies and are likely operated over different...

The U. S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation and Science Center has the responsibility to acquire, manage, and preserve our Nation's land observations. These records are obtained primarily from airplanes and satellites dating back to the 1930s. The ability to compare landscapes from the past with current information enables change analysis at local and global scales. With...

Starting soon after the 1997 eruption at Okmok volcano and continuing until the start of the 2008 eruption, magma accumulated in a storage zone centered ~3.5 km beneath the caldera floor at a rate that varied with time. A Mogi-type point pressure source or finite sphere with a radius of 1 km provides an adequate fit to the deformation field portrayed in time-sequential interferometric...

Bed site selection is an important behavioral trait influencing neonate survival. Vegetation characteristics of bed sites influence thermal protection of neonates and concealment from predators. Although previous studies describe bed site selection of neonatal white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in regions of forested cover, none determined microhabitat effects on neonate bed site...

No abstract available.

The goal of TerraLook is to provide satellite images that anyone can use to see changes in the Earth's surface over time. Landsat and other satellites have been collecting images of the Earth from Space for more than 35 years. TerraLook allows users to create their own collections of georeferenced simulated natural-color JPEG images from Landsat (circa 1975, 1990, 2005) and ASTER (2000...

No abstract available.

The Land Cover Trends is a research project focused on understanding the rates, trends, causes, and consequences of contemporary United States land-use and land-cover change. The project is coordinated by the Geographic Analysis and Monitoring Program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in conjunction with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Aeronautics and...

While research projects have been conducted to examine the impacts and effectiveness of China's ecological restoration programs, few of them represent integrated, systematic efforts. The objective of this chapter is thus to articulate and outline a methodology for an integrative assessment, which, we believe, should embrace both the environmental and socioeconomic changes and engage...

Wetland ecosystems, known as the “kidneys of the earth,” are an important habitat for aquatic fl ora and fauna and provide valuable services and goods for the human beings. The wetlands in Poyang Lake of the Southeast China coastal region are one of the fi rst national natural reserves listed in the Ramsar convention in 1992. Poyang Lake is the largest freshwater lake in China and its...

Land use/land cover (LULC) is one of the most convincing aspects of the global change that has occurred in the terrestrial ecosystem (Meyer and Turner II, 1994; IPCC, 2001). Many changes in LULC refl ect the impacts of human activities on global environment (e.g., Houghton et al., 1999). Change in LULC is also recognized as a main driver affecting the local, regional, and global climate...