Mission Areas
Land Resources
Understanding a changing world and how it affects our natural resources, livelihoods, and communities. Science plays an essential role in helping communities and resource managers understand the local to global implications of change, anticipate the effects of change, prepare for change, and reduce the risks associated with decisionmaking in a changing environment.
EROS Center
The Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is responsible for satellite operations, including Landsat, and performs image data collection, archiving, processing, and distribution.
Explore EROSLandCarbon
The biologic carbon sequestration assessment program (LandCarbon) studies ecosystem carbon cycle research topics, investigates carbon management science needs, and develops monitoring methods.
Learn MoreData and Tools
Land Resources supports the science community with its long-term observational networks and extensive databases encompassing the fields of climate history, land-use and land-cover change, and carbon and nutrient cycles.
U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit
News
EROS Aids in Surveys of Greenhouse Gas-emitting Arctic Lakes
In the Arctic, there are lakes where the bubbles will burn.
The bubbles are filled with methane gas. The flammable archaeal belches form as microbes feast on stores of long-frozen organic matter, freed up for decomposition thanks to permafrost thawing somewhere deep beneath the lakebed.
New EROS Satellite Products, Research Begin to Detail Urban Hot Spots
Cities are hotter than countrysides. That much was known long before efforts began to quantify the urban heat island (UHI) effect with data points.
New Earth As Art Collection Now Available
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is proud to announce the 6th addition to Earth As Art.
Publications
Rapid inundation of the southern Florida coastline despite low relative sea-level rise rates during the late-Holocene
Sediment cores from Florida Bay, Everglades National Park were examined to determine ecosystem response to relative sea-level rise (RSLR) over the Holocene. High-resolution multiproxy analysis from four sites show freshwater wetlands transitioned to mangrove environments 4–3.6 ka, followed by estuarine environments 3.4–2.8 ka, during a period of...
Jones, Miriam; Wingard, G. Lynn; Stackhouse, Bethany; Keller, Katherine; Willard, Debra A.; Marot, Marci E.; Landacre, Bryan D.; Bernhardt, Christopher E. Bundle adjustment using space based triangulation method for improving the Landsat global ground reference
There is an ever-increasing interest and need for accurate geo-registration of remotely sensed data products to a common global geometric reference. Although the geo-registration has improved significantly in the last decade, the lack of an accurate global ground reference dataset poses serious issues for data providers seeking to make...
Choate, Michael; Storey, James C.; Rengarajan, R.; Choate, Michael J. Perspective: Developing flow policies to balance the water needs of humans and wetlands requires a landscape scale approach inclusive of future scenarios and multiple timescales
Maintenance of the natural flow regime is essential for continued wetland integrity; however, the flow regime is greatly influenced by both natural and anthropogenic forces. Wetlands may be particularly susceptible to altered flow regimes as they are directly impacted by water flows at a variety of time scales. In Puerto Rico, contemporary water...
Murry, Brent; Bowden, Jared; Branoff, Benjamin; Garcia-Bermudez, Miguel; Middleton, Beth; Ortiz-Zayas, Jorge; Restrepo, Carla; Terando, Adam