Land Change Science Program

Cattail (Typha) is an iconic emergent wetland plant found worldwide. By producing an abundance of wind-dispersed seeds, cattail can colonize wetlands across great distances, and its rapid growth rate, large size, and aggressive expansion results in dense stands in a variety of aquatic ecosystems such as marshes, ponds, lakes, and riparian areas. These dense stands impact

Land managers representing National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, Navajo Nation, private ranches and farms attend the first RestoreNet stakeholder meeting at the USGS Southwest Biological Science Center in February 2020. 

RAMPS met with DOI Office of Wildland Fire, US Customs and Border Patrol, and US Fish & Wildlife Service staff at Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in southern AZ last November. The group is developing tools to reduce wildfire risk, conserve wildlife habitat and natural resources, and increase safety and security of border operations.

This is Teodora Rautu. She is a Biological Science Technician on the field crew for USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project.  She is measuring the diameter of a red fir and trying to navigate the tape through the branches.  All of the trees in the Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics plots are measured every 5 years, not only for

This is Teodora Rautu. She is a Biological Science Technician on the field crew for USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project.  She is measuring the diameter of a Giant Sequoia.  All of the trees in the Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics plots are measured every 5 years, not only for determining the size of the trees but also for tracking

This is Teodora Rautu. She is a Biological Science Technician on the field crew for USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project. The tree she is getting read to cut into has recently died. Teo is going to remove bark to look for signs of insects or pathogens than may have been involved in the tree's death--the first step in a 'tree

Teodora Rautu and Eva Lopez, Biological Science Technicians on the field crew for the USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project, work together to measure the diameter of a Giant Sequoia. Every tree in the project's long-term study plots are re-measured every 5 years, not only for determining the size of the trees but also for tracking

Amanda Jayo, USGS NAGT Intern, and Caitlin Charlton, Colorado State University graduate student, setting forth to collect chlorophyll from The Loch, Rocky Mountain National Park. This summer research in Loch Vale Watershed’s long-term ecological research and monitoring watershed, is gathering field data to validate remote sensing of mountain lake productivity. If

USGS scientist Summer Praetorius collects samples from an ocean sediment core in the Pacific Ocean Paleoclimatology Lab at Menlo Park, CA. The sediment core is from Tanner Basin, located about 200 miles due west of San Diego in the eastern Pacific Ocean. This area is the southern-most extension of the California Current upwelling system, which brings cold nutrient-rich

Did you know fossil pollen and spores can help us understand past climate variability?

You are looking at microscopic images of ~55-million-year old pollen grains and spores that were isolated from a geologic unit known as the Marlboro Clay in Maryland. The presence of plant groups now found in tropical, subtropical, and temperate areas indicate that climates were

Map of Alaska showing probability (%) of change occurrence. Insets show fire boundaries from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Large Fire Database and Landsat 8 imagery (bottom right; 2016) north of Fairbanks, Alaska.