National Land Imaging Program

Wildfires shape landscapes and affect everything from water supplies to wildlife habitats. The USGS studies fire patterns and their effects using remote sensing data to map and characterize wildland fuels, monitor fire risks, model fire behavior, forecast fire danger, and assess post-fire recovery. This work tracks spatial and temporal patterns of ecosystem disturbance including wildland-urban...

Water sustains communities, agriculture, and ecosystems — and when drought strikes, the effects ripple across all of them. The USGS monitors water availability, surface water extent, and quality at regional, national, and global scales using remote sensing, watershed modeling, and evapotranspiration data. We track vegetation stress, water use, and drought impacts on wildfire risk, invasive species...

Land cover describes the physical material on Earth’s surface, such as forests, grasslands, wetlands, and urban areas. Tracking how these patterns shift over time helps us understand where, how, and why landscapes are changing. Using remote sensing and spatial data, the USGS documents both historical and current land changes and evaluates their effects on society and natural systems at local...