Remote Sensing
Remote Sensing
Sensors mounted on satellites, planes, drones, and ground-based platforms monitor land cover regionally and globally. The Ecosystems Land Change Science Program uses a range of remotely sensed data (including satellite imagery, historical photographs, and land-surface feature maps) to document landscape change and drivers, improve projections of future change, and identify impacts on society.
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Mountains to sea – fluvial transport of carbon and nutrients and effects on ecosystems and people
Stream transport (lateral transfer) of carbon remains a poorly understood flux within the global carbon budget. This research addresses the need to refine our knowledge of both provenance and transformations of Dissolved Organic Matter (DOM) as it moves from mountains to sea. Interpreting shifts in carbon quality with increasing stream order, and how these patterns change with variation in...
Effects of disturbance and drought on the forests and hydrology of the Southern Rocky Mountains
Climate-related forest disturbances, particularly drought-induced tree mortality and large, high-severity fires from increasingly warm and dry conditions, are altering forest ecosystems and the ecosystem services society depends on (e.g., water supplies). Our research combines long-term place-based ecological data, diverse methods (e.g., paleo, remote-sensing), and networking approaches to...
Mechanisms, models, and management of invasive species and soil biogeochemical process in prairie pothole wetlands
The ecological foundation of thousands of acres of wetland habitat is being impacted by changes in land cover, land use, climate, and invasive species. This project utilizes USGS remotely-sensed products, along with experimental and observational field data to develop spatially-explicit, landscape-scale models of invasive cattails and soil biogeochemical processes. These models will assist...
Spatial Modeling of Land Use, Climate, and Environmental Consequences
USGS scientists have a long tradition of providing high-quality, consistent, and relevant land-cover data for the United States, using our archive of current and historical remote sensing data. Scientists at USGS EROS are using their experience in mapping land cover and their knowledge of land-cover change processes to temporally extend these databases beyond the dates of available remote sensing...
Patterns in the Landscape – Analyses of Cause and Effect
Understanding the rates and causes of land-use/land-cover (LULC) change helps answer questions about what, where, how, and why the Earth’s surface is changing. Land-surface change results from human activities or natural processes like floods, droughts, and wildfires, and many of these change processes are observable in satellite imagery. The growing historical catalog of satellite images allows...
Snow and Avalanche Research
Snow scientists with the USGS are unraveling specific weather, climate, and snowpack factors that contribute to large magnitude avalanches in an effort to understand these events as both a hazard and a landscape–level disturbance. The Snow and Avalanche Project (SNAP) advances our understanding of avalanche-climate interactions and wet snow avalanches, and improves public safety through innovative...