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Every pixel has a story. At least that’s how land remote sensing scientist Jo Horton sees it. The new Annual National Land Cover Database (NLCD) was just released in October 2024. NLCD is widely used for land cover and change research in the U.S.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk to ground station technicians to find out how Landsat satellite data gets from the spacecraft to EROS and then to the archive. We see what it’s like in EROS’s Landsat operations room and what the technicians do before, during, and after a Landsat pass.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we mingle at the 2024 EROS Fall Poster Session. A poster session is essentially a way for scientists to share their work with their colleagues in a public forum. About 30 posters were on display in the EROS atrium from EROS staff and several students from South Dakota State University and the University of South Dakota.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk about the incredible career of Landsat 7, which collected science imagery of the Earth for nearly 25 years. The Flight Operations Team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and engineers at EROS work together to collect imagery, send commands to the satellite, and keep it healthy.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk about the latest release of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). More than just a map, NLCD is a stack of maps—a database. It has long been the foundational land cover source for scientists, resource managers, and decision-makers across the United States, and now the next generation of USGS land cover mapping is here.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk about the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) project, which is commemorating its 20th year of providing geospatial data to support natural resource management and wildland fire planning. LANDFIRE brings a lot of data together, over 30 data products, into one place.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk to forest ecologist Jim Lutz about the effort to map fires in Utah. Fire research in the West is dominated by the study of large fires, but the forests in Utah are different. Utah typically does not have a lot of large fires as other western states do.

This Eyes on Earth episode is the third in our series on using Landsat for coastal studies. We talk to physical geographer Jeff Danielson about bathymetry and how it is critical for coastal modeling. Bathymetry captures the shape of underwater topography, and satellite-derived bathymetry helps fill in areas where there are data gaps.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talked with some of the interns who worked at EROS this summer. They shared their experiences learning about the cloud, AI, wildland fire research, terrestrial lidar scanning, and more. The common theme among them was recognizing the value of the EROS mission and noticing the passion their co-workers demonstrated in their work.

This episode of Eyes on Earth is the second in a series about how Landsat is helping researchers study coastal changes. The first one was about mapping changes to beaches in California and using Landsat to create models to predict how the coastline may change in the future because of sea level rise and coastal erosion.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we begin a series on Landsat’s usefulness in coastal studies. First, we talk with Sean Vitousek, a USGS research oceanographer, about changes to beaches in California and how he is using Landsat and other data to create models that can predict how the coastline may change in the future because of sea level rise and coastal erosion.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk with Kristi Kline about the constant changes and innovations that have been needed at EROS to keep up with changes in computer tech and data processing. Kline has been a part of helping to implement these changes over the past 27 years and is now retiring at the end of May 2024.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk with several people involved with the next Landsat mission, targeted for launch around 2030. While that may seem like a ways into the future, it takes a lot of work to prepare for such a big mission.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we talk with several people involved with the next Landsat mission. In Part 1, we’ll hear about how different Landsat Next will be from previous Landsat missions and how its additional spectral bands, higher resolution and 6-day revisit will benefit science and society.

Landsat has documented changes all over the world for over 50 years. Changes in polar regions are happening especially rapidly. But it’s dark in polar regions much of the time. Therefore, a new acquisition scheme is adding more imagery of these dark, polar regions so these changes can be studied in more detail, even in polar twilight.

Women have been crucial to the EROS workforce from the very beginning in a variety of areas, from customer service and computers to film processing and administration.

AmericaView aims to advance Earth observation education through a network of programs based at universities in more than 40 states.

The boreal forest, or taiga, stretches across nearly 5.7 million square miles in the northern latitudes. That’s nearly a quarter of all forested lands in the world. This sprawling biome also happens to be one of the most rapidly shifting in the face of climate change.

In this episode of Eyes on Earth, we zero in on the use of USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) products to examine the effects of drought on California’s Blue Oaks. LCMAP datasets are built from Landsat data and reveal the land cover and change of every pixel in the conterminous United States, dating back to 1985.

The rangelands of the western United States are changing more quickly than many other parts of the lower 48. Miles upon miles of the area or semi-arid landscapes in states like Idaho, Montana and Nevada are now carpeted by fire fueling invasive grasses. Cheatgrass is the most prevalent, which is troublesome for several reasons.

For our third and final episode of Eyes on Earth from the September launch of Landsat 9, we hear from Virginia Norwood. She blazed a trail for women in remote sensing in the 1960s and 70s while working for Hughes Aircraft, a contractor for NASA.