Images

Land managers representing National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Forest Service, Navajo Nation, private ranches and farms attend the first RestoreNet stakeholder meeting at the USGS Southwest Biological Science Center in February 2020. 

A mangrove forest along the western Gulf of Mexico coast (near Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico). With warming winters, mangrove forests are expected to expand northward at the expense of salt marshes in parts of Texas, Louisiana, and north Florida.

RAMPS met with DOI Office of Wildland Fire, US Customs and Border Patrol, and US Fish & Wildlife Service staff at Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in southern AZ last November. The group is developing tools to reduce wildfire risk, conserve wildlife habitat and natural resources, and increase safety and security of border operations.

Arid grasslands in the U.S. Mexico border are fire adapted and used by diverse groups. Science from the Southwest Biological Science Center and the Restoration Assessment and Monitoring Program for the Southwest (RAMPS) is helping these groups find common ground to manage this dynamic landscape.

RestoreNet is a networked experiment testing treatments for improving restoration in drylands. Find out more at www.usgs.gov/sbsc/ramps

USGS Restoration Assessment and Monitoring Program for the Southwest (RAMPS) is helping to build capacity in ecosystem restoration on the Navajo Nation with a series of projects in collaboration with Navajo Nation Department of Natural Hertiage, Dine Native Plant Program, and the Native-led non-profit Tolani Lake Enterprises.

This is Teodora Rautu. She is a Biological Science Technician on the field crew for USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project.  She is measuring the diameter of a red fir and trying to navigate the tape through the branches.

This is Teodora Rautu. She is a Biological Science Technician on the field crew for USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project.  She is measuring the diameter of a Giant Sequoia.

Teodora Rautu and Eva Lopez, Biological Science Technicians on the field crew for the USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project, work together to measure the diameter of a Giant Sequoia.

This is Teodora Rautu. She is a Biological Science Technician on the field crew for USGS Western Ecological Research Center's Sierra Nevada Forest Dynamics project. The tree she is getting read to cut into has recently died.

Amanda Jayo, USGS NAGT Intern, and Caitlin Charlton, Colorado State University graduate student, setting forth to collect chlorophyll from The Loch, Rocky Mountain National Park. This summer research in Loch Vale Watershed’s long-term ecological research and monitoring watershed, is gathering field data to validate remote sensing of mountain lake productivity.

USGS scientist Summer Praetorius of the Geology, Minerals, Energy, & Geophysics (GMEG) Science Center collects samples from an ocean sediment core in the Pacific Ocean Paleoclimatology Lab at Menlo Park, CA. The sediment core is from Tanner Basin, located about 200 miles due west of San Diego in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Did you know fossil pollen and spores can help us understand past climate variability?

Map of Alaska showing probability (%) of change occurrence. Insets show fire boundaries from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Large Fire Database and Landsat 8 imagery (bottom right; 2016) north of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Fire Potential Index map for October 10, 2018.

Large Fire Probability for August 30, 2018.  Percent change estimate, given a source for ignition that a fire will grow to 100+ acres.

This map takes into account both probability of ignition and conditional probability of spread (to 500+ acres in East and 1000+ acres in West*) given ignition.

This map takes into account both probability of ignition and conditional probability of spread (to 500+ acres in East and 1000+ acres in West*) given ignition.

The FPI is most similar to the Energy Release Component of the National Fire Danger Rating System in that both are moisture related indexes and neither indicates the effect of wind on fire potential. 

Summary of Fires by GACC Units: For the week of 08/29/2018

In July of 2016, a team from the Climate and Land Use Research and Development Program took a trip to South Carolina to study outcrops of the “Canepatch” and “Socastee” formations along the Intra-Coastal Waterway, near Myrtle Beach. The age of these fossiliferous marine units has been controversial for several decades.