Landscape Change

Soils are the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems. They provide critical services including supplying a substrate and the nutrients necessary for plant growth, retaining moisture from precipitation, filtering contaminants from percolating waters, and acting as a sink of carbon. Healthy soils are key to sustaining both human and ecosystem health. However, global- and regional-scale disturbances...

The past decade encompasses some of the most extensive fire activity in recorded history. An area the size of Vermont (~24,000 km2) burned in a single Siberian fire in the summer of 2019 (Kehrwald et al., 2020 and references therein) while Australia, Indonesia and the Amazon have all experienced their most intense fires in recorded history (van Wees et al, 2021 and references therein). As more...

Land cover change is one of the fundamental measures for understanding pressures on ecosystems and is widely used to understand the consequences to biodiversity and ecosystem services. This study utilizes land cover and other associated socioeconomic and environmental data to examine the consequences of land cover change in human-dominated landscapes, and how provisioning of ecosystem services...

Drought and fire are powerful disturbance agents that can trigger rapid and lasting changes in the forests of western North America. Over the last decade, increases in fire size and severity coincided with warming, drought, and earlier snowmelt, factors that projected climatic changes are likely to exacerbate. However, recent observations are brief relative to the lifespans of trees and include...

Denali National Park (DENA) is a major draw for tourism and recreation and a major economic engine for central Alaska. However, the geologic forces that created the steep landscape of DENA also make it prone to geologic hazards (geohazards) like landslides, debris flows, and earthquakes. DENA has only one major road, called the ‘Park Road’, that serves nearly all of its infrastructure. Since 2017...

Ecosystem condition tends to be highly dynamic in response to natural variability in climate, extreme climate events, disturbance events, and human land use activities. Satellite imagery provides a powerful tool to enhance our understanding of ecosystem change at a landscape scale. This research integrates diverse sources of satellite imagery with ancillary datasets to explore how ecosystems...

Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) track critical attributes of the atmosphere, oceanic, and terrestrial systems over time-scales appropriate for analyzing their relationships with climate change. As part of a larger Climate Data Record (CDR) and ECV project, scientists at GECSC are leading the development and validation of the Burned Area ECV algorithm. This algorithm automatically extracts...

The Cenozoic Landscape Evolution of the Southern Rocky Mountains Project is a multi-year investigation funded by the National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program. This project utilizes a combination of geologic mapping, geophysical surveys, basin modeling, and structural, neotectonic, geomorphic, volcanic, stratigraphic, and geochronologic studies to better understand the geologic landscape of...

Ecosystem services are the benefits that nature provides to human well-being: clean air and water, protection from natural disasters, fisheries, crop pollination and control of pests and disease, and outdoor places for recreation, solitude, and renewal. Ecosystem services underlie the functioning of our entire economy. They are neither worthless nor priceless, and by integrating the physical...

Energy is a cornerstone issue for humanity, nations, and individuals. How we create and use energy impacts the consequences it embodies. The critical issue facing humanity involves meeting our massive and growing energy needs, without undermining human and natural capital. Facing the challenge of long-term, sustainable energy for the nation and world requires understanding the consequences of...

Climate changes can significantly affect species and ecosystems. Historical and paleoenvironmental data record species and ecosystem responses to past climate changes, but these records become sparse as one goes further back in time. Model simulations can be used fill the spatial and temporal gaps in observed records to improve our understanding of the potential magnitude, rate, and spatial...

Detailed geologic mapping is being conducted by the USGS in and adjacent to the Buffalo National River, a park administered by the National Park Service, to better understand and characterize the natural resources and associated ecosystems of this area within the Ozark Plateau region. General-purpose geologic maps are created to provide a framework for a host of natural resource, natural history...