Images

Bear Lake, Colorado is a high alpine lake near tree line that is affected by regional to local fires and vegetation changes.

View of the Anadarko sedimentary basin from above, looking to the northeast. Colored surfaces represent the top of specific geologic units as mapped in the subsurface.

USGS remote pilots Joe Adams and Matt Burgess each flying a UAS mounted with a hyperspectral sensor over ponds at the USGS Eastern Ecological Science Center - Leetown Research Laboratory (EESC-LRL) 

Perspective view of the Colorado Plateau looking from above to the northwest. Image shows a part J.C.

Perspective view of the Continental U.S. showing an elevation surface of the top of crystalline Precambrian “basement” rocks. Brown and orange colors depict the highest elevations; greens show the lowest elevations. Surface is incomplete in the western U.S. where there are no published “basement” maps or where crystalline Precambrian rocks are not present.

Photograph of Blanca Peak (Colorado) looking up at an alluvial fan and glacial moraine sourced from an alpine catchment. Deposits like these are often important records of past changes in erosion, sedimentation, and tectonic activity.

This image depicts a Quaternary fault scarp running vertically across the center of the image, separating active sedimentation on the left from eroding mountain catchments on the right.

View east across Dixie Valley from the crest of the Stillwater Range, western Nevada. In the foreground are igneous rocks of an Oligocene caldera complex; bedrock in the Desatoya Mountains on the horizon is a slightly younger caldera complex. A major challenge for bedrock mapping is inferring what is in the subsurface between exposures like these.

USGS Geologist Natalie Kehrwald takes a tree ring sample. Tree rings can provide sub-seasonal records of hydroclimate and fire over centennial time scales.

Landscape-scale fire and wind damage to tree stands on the Trinchera Ranch, Colorado

Closeup of a tree core sample showing tree rings obtained using increment borer, Dinosaur National Monument.

USGS researcher Matt Burgess remotely pilots a UAS collecting lidar data during the April 2022 USGS UASnow project at Berthoud Pass, Colorado.

Map view of the Continental U.S. showing a national-scale elevation surface of the base of Cenozoic rocks. Dark brown irregular polygons are outcrops of Precambrian rocks.

One productive coring trip provides >50-m of sediment for analyses and curation. The Quaternary Lab currently stores ~350-m of soft sediment cores collected between 2005 and 2025.

USGS researcher Joe Adams in front of a UAS ground control target at a burned site within the Lake–Napa Unit (LNU) Lightning Complex fire area.

Manual piston coring is used for lakes <20-m water depth and can obtain up to 15-20m sediment core.

A UAS collecting natural color video over one of the study sites during a joint NUSO and USGS Water Resources Mission Area snow mapping project in Winter Park, Colorado.

USGS researcher Joe Adams (NUSO) setting up a GPS base station at one of the study sites for a snow mapping project in Winter Park, Colorado. GPS base station data is used in post-processing to improve the geospatial accuracy of UAS collected data.

USGS NUSO researchers Victoria Scholl and Mark Bauer take a moment to enjoy the scenery during a UAS data collection for the snow water equivalent (SWE) project at the Berthoud Pass Colorado study site.

Please don’t walk on the biocrust!

Drone's eye view of a USGS remote pilot during a biocrust mission near Moab, UT

NUSO UAS pilot Matt Burgess captures an image of himself while landing a UAS after a flight over a biocrust site near Moab, Utah.