All Funded Projects

Drought is a major problem in the American Southwest that is expected to worsen under the effects of climate change. Currently, the Southwest Biological Science Center is monitoring the effects of drought with soil moisture probes in a range of ecosystems across an elevational gradient on the Colorado Plateau. These data are used in multiple studies to analyze the effects of drought on...

The Total Water Level and Coastal Change Forecast delivers 6-day forecasts of hourly water levels and the probability of waves impacting dunes along 5000 km of sandy coasts along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico and will soon expand to the Pacific. These forecasts provide needed information to local governments and federal partners and are used by the USGS to place sensors before a storm...

The USGS maintains an extensive monitoring network throughout the United States in order to protect the public and help manage natural resources. This network generates millions of data points each year, all of which must be evaluated and reviewed manually for quality assurance and control. Sensor malfunctions and issues can result in data losses and unexpected costs, and are typically...

We aim to migrate our research workflow from a closed system to an open framework, increasing flexibility and transparency in our science and accessibility of our data. Our hyperspectral data of agricultural crops are crucial for training/ validating machine learning algorithms to study food security, land use, etc. Generating such data is resource-intensive and requires expertise...

The purpose of this study is to understand how the USGS is using decision support, learning from successes and pitfalls in order to help streamline the design and development process across all levels of USGS scientific tool creation and outreach. What should researchers consider before diving into tool design and development? Our goal is to provide a synthesis of lessons learned and...

A unique opportunity for USGS to collaborate with IRIS-PASSCAL (the national seismic instrument facility) has presented itself to develop a geophysical data archive format that follows FAIR principles. IRIS-PASSCAL is extending facility to include magnetotelluric (MT) instruments prescribing the need for them to archive collected MT data by extending their existing protocol. Concurrently

Many coastal areas are experiencing departures from normal conditions due to changing land use and climate patterns, including increased frequency, severity, or duration of floods and droughts, in some cases combinations of the two. To address these issues, the U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Salinity Index (CSI) to identify and communicate fluctuating salinity conditions...

We are working to incorporate environmental DNA (eDNA) data into the Nonindigenous Aquatic Species (NAS) database, which houses over 570,000 records of nonindigenous species nationally, and already is used by a broad user-base of managers and researchers regularly for invasive species monitoring. eDNA studies have allowed for the identification and biosurveillance of numerous invasive...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing ecology and conservation by enabling species recognition from photos and videos. Our project evaluates the capacity to expand AI for individual fish recognition for population assessment. The success of this effort would facilitate fisheries analysis at an unprecedented scale by engaging anglers and citizen scientists in imagery collection...

Rangeland ecosystems are one of the largest single providers of agro-ecological services in the U.S. The plant growth of these rangelands helps determine the amount of forage available for our livestock and for wildlife, as well as information about fire likelihood and restoration opportunities. However, every spring, ranchers and other rangeland managers face the same difficult...

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are instruments that collect water-quality, depth, and other data in waterbodies. They produce complex and massive datasets. There is currently no standard method to store, organize, process, quality-check, analyze, or visualize this data. The Waterbody Rapid Assessment Tool (WaterRAT) is aPython application that processes and displays water-quality...

In the mid-1800s, tile-drains were installed in poorly-drained soils of topographic lows as water management to protect cropland during wet conditions; consequently, estimations of tile-drain location have been based on soil series. Most tile drains are in the Midwest, however each state has farms with tile and tile-drain density has increased in the last decade. Where tile drains...