Integrated Land Change Monitoring

Terry Sohl has topped off three decades of working in EROS science by accepting that branch’s leadership role.

The next step for two strong land cover products at USGS EROS is to combine them to create something even better.

The USGS is collaborating with researchers from other agencies, academia, and industry to predict coastal impacts from hurricanes. The results from this study will better inform coastal morphological change models, which will lead to improved hurricane impact projections.

The Land Change Monitoring, Assessment and Projection (LCMAP) project has generated an integrated suite of annual land cover and land surface change products for the United States based on time series data from the Landsat record from 1985–2021. LCMAP Collection 1.3 Science Products are based on the USGS implementation of the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm.

Landsat Collection 2 Level-3 Burned Area (BA) contains two acquisition-based raster data products that represent burn classification and burn probability.

The Land Change Monitoring, Assessment and Projection (LCMAP) project has generated an integrated suite of annual land cover and land surface change products for the United States based on time series data from the Landsat record from 1985–2020. LCMAP Collection 1.2 Science Products are based on the USGS implementation of the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm.

High-resolution light detection and ranging (lidar) elevation data were acquired along the north coast of Alaska between 2009 and 2012. The lidar acquisition, from Icy Cape, Alaska to the United States/Canadian border, comprised approximately 11,000 km 2 . The airborne lidar data were acquired in support of the U.S. Geological Survey Coastal and Marine Geology Program. The purpose of this lidar...

To support the modeling of the Colorado River water storage area capacity tables by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Utah Water Science Center, the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center created a 3D high-resolution topobathymetric digital elevation model (TBDEM) for Lake Powell. Located in south-central Utah and north-central Arizona, the second largest man-made reservoir in...

The desert outpost of Palm Springs, California and the surrounding Thousand Palms region has experienced explosive population growth over the past four decades, with tract after tract of development filling in previously barren landscapes along Interstate 10.

At first glance, the most striking patterns in land cover change over time in this animation of the Oso, Washington area would appear to be forest harvest and regrowth, but a more dramatic change emerged in 2014.

The man-made Florida playland of Walt Disney World has grown outward on all sides since the amusement park’s construction commenced in the 1960s. Much of that growth has overtaken the wetlands, tree cover and grassland/shrublands near Orlando.

Each of the polygons in the topographic change inventory has numerous attributes associated with it. These attributes allow a ranking of features based on the magnitude of change, as measured by polygon descriptors (area and volume) and changes in terrain parameters (elevation, relief, slope, aspect). The ability to do such a ranking points out one of the advantages of producing spatially explicit...