Integrated Land Change Monitoring

Land-use change and the resultant changes in land cover impact a wide variety of ecological processes. Projected land-cover data produced by EROS have been used for a wide variety of applications, including those listed in the left column. The following provides a partial list of published applications for modeled land-use and land-cover data.

Many factors determine how human beings modify the earth's landscape. Land-cover change is inherently a local event, yet broader scale socioeconomic and biophysical factors also affect how humans make decisions to use the landscape. Projecting future land cover requires modelers to account for driving forces of land-cover change operating at scales from local ("bottom-up") to global ("top-down")...

The primary result of the data processing explained in the Methods section is a polygon feature dataset that locates and describes the areas in the conterminous United States that have experienced significant topographic change during the 20th century.

Image differencing has long been used as an effective change detection technique for coregistered digital remote sensing datasets. One image is simply subtracted from another image on a pixel-by-pixel basis. As applied to gridded DEMs, the result of image differencing is a differential surface, which is a measure of the spatial distribution of mass displacement. In a differential surface, the...

The USGS has developed a national inventory of significant topographic changes based on seamless multitemporal elevation data and land cover data. The National Elevation Dataset (NED) and the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data form a unique pair of seamless elevation datasets that can be used to detect and analyze 20th century topographic surface changes in the United States.

High-resolution coastal elevation data is required to identify flood, hurricane, and sea-level rise inundation hazard zones and other earth science applications, such as the development of sediment transport and storm surge models. Light detection and ranging (lidar) enables the rapid collection of very accurate elevation data over large areas, and during the last decade, airborne laser altimetry...

A planet with a changing climate and growing population forces tough decisions about the use of limited resources. Making sustainable choices in the face of global change requires an accurate cataloging of those resources. Since 1991, EROS has been the North American node for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Resource Information Database (UNEP-GRID), which tracks environmental...

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) is a winter annual grass that has invaded and altered the shrub steppe ecosystem in the Great Basin for about 100 years. This highly competitive grass invades recently disturbed areas and then outcompetes most native vegetation by using requisite resources like soil water and nutrients in early spring before other native plants. It also can alter its phenotype and...

Water bodies surrounded by land serve as sources of fresh drinking water, play host to millions of species of fish, underwater vegetation and wildlife and maintain the vibrancy of surrounding ecosystems. These water bodies can also be hubs for recreational activities such as boating, fishing, waterskiing, swimming that boost local economies.

The importance of sea-level rise in shaping coastal landscapes is well recognized within the earth science community, but as with many natural hazards, communicating the risks associated with sea-level rise remains a challenge.

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center National Land Cover Database team in collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has produced the most comprehensive remote-sensing based quantification of western United States shrublands to date.

EROS is central to the creation of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) which stands as the definitive land cover database for the United States.