Publications

The series of Landsat missions has compiled the longest record of satellite observation of the Earth’s land surface, extending for more than 38 years for most areas of the globe. Landsat data are particularly important as long term climate data records because the scale of observation is sufficient to differentiate between natural and human drivers of land cover change. The USGS has...

Most government agencies involved in land management are seeking consistent approaches to evaluate the effects of specific management actions on ecological processes and concurrent changes on ecosystem services. This is especially true within the context of anthropogenic influences, such as land use and climate change. The Conservation Effects Assessment Project—Wetlands National...

Evapotranspiration (ET) can be derived from satellite data using surface energy balance principles. METRIC (Mapping EvapoTranspiration at high Resolution with Internalized Calibration) is one of the most widely used models available in the literature to estimate ET from satellite imagery. The Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEB) model is much easier and less expensive to implement...

This U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Global Change Science Strategy expands on the Climate Variability and Change science component of the USGS 2007 Science Strategy, “Facing Tomorrow’s Challenges: USGS Science in the Coming Decade” (U.S. Geological Survey, 2007). Here we embrace the broad definition of global change provided in the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990 (Public Law 101...

Observations and simulations link anthropogenic greenhouse and aerosol emissions with rapidly increasing Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures (SSTs). Over the past 60 years, the Indian Ocean warmed two to three times faster than the central tropical Pacific, extending the tropical warm pool to the west by ~40° longitude (>4,000 km). This propensity toward rapid warming in the Indian...

The information on the mangrove forests for the Pacific region is scarce or outdated. A regional assessment based on a consistent methodology and data sources was needed to understand their true extent. Our investigation offers a regionally consistent, high resolution (30 m), and the most comprehensive mapping of mangrove forests on the islands of American Samoa, Fiji, French Polynesia...

Aim  Our scientific understanding of the extent and distribution of mangrove forests of the world is inadequate. The available global mangrove databases, compiled using disparate geospatial data sources and national statistics, need to be improved. Here, we mapped the status and distributions of global mangroves using recently available Global Land Survey (GLS) data and the Landsat...

The carbon in ecosystems exists in dynamic soil and vegetation pools which vary in amounts and cycle with the global atmosphere at varying rates. These stocks and fluxes play important roles in global carbon regulation and in the maintenance of goods and services. Changes in land cover or ecosystems result in increased or decreased fluxes to the atmosphere and play a major role in...

No abstract available.

A major concern of land managers in the United States is the response of watersheds to weather after a wildfire. With an ever-expanding wildland-urban interface (WUI), land managers must be cognizant of potential damage to private property and other values at risk. In the United States, land-management agencies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of the...

Land-cover composition and change have profound impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. Land-cover and land-use (LCLU) conditions and their changes can affect social and physical environments by altering ecosystem conditions and services. Information about LCLU change is often used to produce landscape-based metrics and evaluate landscape conditions to monitor LCLU status and trends over a...

Since the days of MacArthur, three-dimensional (3-D) structural information on the environment has fundamentally transformed scientific understanding of ecological phenomena (MacArthur and MacArthur 1961). Early data on ecosystem structure were painstakingly laborious to collect. However, as reviewed and reported in recent volumes of Frontiers(eg Vierling et al. 2008; Asner et al.2011)...