Reports

The Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment and Projection (RCMAP) project quantifies the percentage cover of rangeland components across the western United States using Landsat imagery from 1985 to 2021. The RCMAP product suite consists of nine fractional components: annual herbaceous, bare ground, herbaceous, litter, nonsagebrush shrub, perennial herbaceous, sagebrush, shrub, and...

Introduction The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Civil Applications Center (NCAC) analyzes remote-sensing data from the Intelligence Community (IC) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to support public safety missions and to study land-surface and environmental changes. The NCAC provides remotely sensed images to USGS scientists and other civilian Federal agencies; the images...

In 2021, the U.S. Geological Survey will collect water-quality samples and environmental data from 3 sites in Koocanusa Reservoir and from 1 site in the Kootenai River. The transboundary Koocanusa Reservoir is in southeastern British Columbia, Canada, and northwestern Montana, United States, and was formed with the construction of Libby Dam on the Kootenai River 26 kilometers upstream...

Keys to Clay-colored Sparrow (Spizella pallida) management include providing grasslands with a shrub or forb component or shrub-dominated edge habitat, which includes dense grass and moderately high litter cover, and avoiding disturbances that completely eliminate woody vegetation. Clay-colored Sparrows have been reported to use habitats with 20–186 centimeters (cm) average vegetation...

Coastal flooding takes many forms, ranging from major flooding associated with storms to minor flooding associated with exceptionally high tides and other oceanic and atmospheric phenomena on storm-free days. A major societal challenge is to understand and predict how flood magnitude and frequency will manifest at particular places and times, now and in the future. Of particular interest...

Fish communities of the Mohawk River and associated sections of the New York State Canal System have been well documented but little information is available regarding the status of fish communities in the extensive network of tributaries that feed the Mohawk River. This lack of information is problematic because changes in species distributions or general ecosystem health may go...

Flood frequency characteristics and estimated flood discharges for the 50-, 20-, 10-, 4-, 2-, 1-, 0.5-, and 0.2-percent annual exceedance probabilities were computed at 299 streamgaged locations in Wisconsin. The State was divided into four flood frequency regions using a cluster analysis to produce regions which are homogeneous with respect to physical basin characteristics. Regression...

Introduction Detailed geologic maps are the basis of most earth science investigations and can be used for natural hazard mitigation, resource identification and exploration, infrastructure planning, and more. As a part of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) congressionally mandated National Cooperative Geologic Mapping Program (NCGMP), the EDMAP program (referred to as EDMAP) is a...

Introduction The U.S. Geological Survey’s online Water Science School is a one-stop shop for water education resources. In addition to sharing images, data, and diagrams, the Water Science School provides lesson plans for teachers as well as multiple interactive activities for students, such as questionnaires, calculators, and quizzes. This bookmark introduces Drippy, the Water Science...

A limited review of relevant scientific literature related to temperature sensitivities of fish species, stream health indicators, and any related geospatial information was conducted. Based on this review, we provide a syntheses of information related to nontidal waters in the Chesapeake Bay Rising stream temperatures will have a range of impacts on nontidal aquatic ecosystems. Cold...

The primary purpose of this document is to convey product specifications of the OPERA (Observational Products for End-users from Remote-sensing Analysis) Level-3 Dynamic Surface Water Extent (DSWx) product that uses Harmonized Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2A/B (HLS) as the primary image-based inputs. This product, referred to by the short name DSWx-HLS, will be generated by the OPERA Data...

This report documents morphological changes between 1953 and 2021 at East Timbalier Island, Louisiana, a Gulf of Mexico barrier island. East Timbalier Island, which was located west of the Mississippi River Delta at the front of Timbalier Bay, was one of the most rapidly changing barrier islands on Earth. Since aerial photographs were initially taken in 1953, the Island steadily lost...