Publications

This assessment was conducted to fulfill the requirements of section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and to contribute to knowledge of the storage, fluxes, and balance of carbon and methane gas in ecosystems of Alaska. The carbon and methane variables were examined for major terrestrial ecosystems (uplands and wetlands) and inland aquatic ecosystems in Alaska in...

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) uses a laser system called ‘lidar’ (light detection and ranging) to create a virtual reality map of the Nation that is very accurate. 3D maps have many uses with new uses being discovered all the time.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) was recently established to provide airborne lidar data coverage on a national scale. As part of a broader research effort of the USGS to develop an effective remote sensing-based methodology for the creation of an operational biomass Essential Climate Variable (Biomass ECV) data product, we evaluated the performance of...

Context

The majority of restoration strategies in the wake of large-scale disasters have focused on short-term emergency response solutions. Few consider medium- to long-term restoration strategies to reconnect urban areas to national supply chain interdependent critical infrastructure systems (SCICI). These SCICI promote the effective flow of goods, services, and information vital to the...

Geospatial data, often embedded with geographic references, are important to many application and science domains, and represent a major type of big data. The increased volume and diversity of geospatial data have caused serious usability issues for researchers in various scientific domains, which call for innovative cyberGIS solutions. To address these issues, this paper describes a...

Old, archived geologic maps are often available with little or no associated metadata. This creates special problems in terms of extracting their data to use with a modern database. This research focuses on some problems and uncertainties associated with conflating older geologic maps in regions where modern geologic maps are, as yet, non-existent as well as vertically integrating the...

Distance metrics play significant roles in spatial modeling tasks, such as flood inundation (Tucker and Hancock 2010), stream extraction (Stanislawski et al. 2015), power line routing (Kiessling et al. 2003) and analysis of surface pollutants such as nitrogen (Harms et al. 2009). Avalanche risk is based on slope, aspect, and curvature, all directly computed from distance metrics...

The National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) for the United States furnishes a comprehensive set of vector features representing the surface-waters in the country (U.S. Geological Survey 2000). The high-resolution (HR) layer of the NHD is largely comprised of hydrographic features originally derived from 1:24,000-scale (24K) U.S. Topographic maps. However, in recent years (2009 to present)...

The term “resilience” is ubiquitous in technical literature; it appears in numerous forms, such as resilience, resiliency, or resilient, and each use may have a different definition depending on the interpretation of the writer. This creates difficulties in understanding what is meant by ‘resilience’ in any given use case, especially in discussions of interdisciplinary research. To...

In order to provide the land cover user community a summary of the similarity and differences between the 2011 National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) and the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Program Existing Vegetation 2010 Data (LANDFIRE EVT), the two datasets were compared at a national (conterminous U.S.) and regional (Eastern, Midwestern, and Western) extents (Figure...