Water Availability and Sustainability

San Carlos Apache Reservation covers 1.8 million acres in east-central Arizona, and has diverse ecosystems and vegetation types that support a natural resource-based economy.

This webpage showcases the key research advances made in hyperspectral remote sensing of agricultural crops and vegetation over the last 50 years. There are three focus areas:

The GFSAD30 is a NASA funded project to provide high resolution global cropland data and their water use that contributes towards global food security in the twenty-first century. The GFSAD30 products are derived through multi-sensor remote sensing data (e.g., Landsat, MODIS, AVHRR), secondary data, and field-plot data and aims at documenting cropland dynamics from 1990 to 2017.

Most of western North America has been severely grazed by cattle, causing grasslands to deteriorate and desert scrub expansion. Climate in arid and semi-arid regions is often typified by short, intense rainfall events which contribute to short-term flooding and erosion. Associated arroyo cutting occurs when ephemeral creek beds are carved into the floodplain when erratic overland flow occurs; this...

Coastal marine fog is an important meteorological phenomenon for California. A cloud—either stratus or stratocumulus—is called “fog” when it is low or touching the ground. Marine fog forms as a result of complex interactions between ocean evaporation, aerosols, atmospheric pressure, vertical air layering, onshore-offshore temperature gradients, and coastal mountain topography. The marine cloud...

We are a research team focusing on understanding the rates, causes, and consequences of land change across a range of geographic and temporal scales. Our emphasis is on developing alternative future projections and quantifying the impact on environmental systems, in particular, the role of land-use change on ecosystem carbon dynamics.We are interested in how land-use and climate systems will...