Publications

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Fundamental Science Practices (FSP) are a set of standard principles fundamental to how USGS conducts and carries out its science activities and how resulting information products and data are reviewed, approved, and released. These policies, practices, philosophical premises, and operational principles serve as the foundation for all USGS research and...

Previous moderate- and high-temperature geothermal resource assessments of the western United States utilized data-driven methods and expert decisions to estimate resource favorability. Although expert decisions can add confidence to the modeling process by ensuring reasonable models are employed, expert decisions also introduce human and, thereby, model bias. This bias can present a...

The use of remote sensing in time series analysis enables wall-to-wall monitoring of the land surface and is critical for assessing and understanding land cover and land use change and for understanding the Earth system as a whole. However, variability in remote sensing observation frequency through time and across space presents challenges for producing consistent change detection...

Debris flow runout poses a hazard to life and infrastructure. The expansion of human population into mountainous areas and onto alluvial fans increases the need to predict and mitigate debris flow runout hazards. Debris flows on unconfined alluvial fans can exhibit spontaneous self-channelization through levee formation that reduces lateral spreading and extends runout distances compared...

Watch lists of invasive species that threaten a particular land management unit are useful tools because they can draw attention to invasive species at the very early stages of invasion when early detection and rapid response efforts are often most successful. However, watch lists typically rely on the subjective selection of invasive species by experts or on the use of spotty occurrence...

National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2019 is a new epoch of national land cover products for the conterminous United States. Image quality is fundamental to the quality of any land cover product. Image preprocessing has often taken a considerable proportion of overall time and effort for this kind of national project. An approach to prepare image inputs for NLCD 2019 production was...

Species vulnerable to climate change face increased extinction risk, but many sensitive species may be overlooked due to limited data and exclusion from vulnerability assessments. Intrinsic sensitivity, or the inherent risk of species to environmental change due to biological factors, can be assessed with widely available data and may address gaps in multispecies vulnerability...

While nonstationary flood frequency analysis (NSFFA) methods have proliferated, few studies have rigorously compared them for modeling changes in both the central tendency and variability of annual peak-flow series, also known as the annual maximum series (AMS), in hydrologically diverse areas. Through Monte Carlo experiments, we appraise five methods for updating estimates of 10- and...

Following the completion of land cover and change (LCC) products for the conterminous United States (CONUS), the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS’s) Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection initiative has broadened the capability of characterizing continuous historical land change across the full Landsat records for Hawaiʻi at 30-meter resolution. One of the challenges of...

The National Gap Analysis Project created species habitat distribution models for all terrestrial vertebrates in the United States to support conservation assessments and explore patterns of species richness. Those models link species to specific habitats throughout the range of each species. For most vertebrates, there are not enough occurrence data to drive inductive, range-wide...

The Community for Data Integration is a community of practice whose purpose is to advance the data integration capabilities of the U.S. Geological Survey. In fiscal year 2020, the Community for Data Integration held 11 monthly forums, facilitated 13 collaboration areas, and supported 13 projects. The activities supported the broad U.S. Geological Survey priority of producing building...

Forest covers about one-third of the land area of the conterminous United States (CONUS) and plays an important role in offsetting carbon emissions and supporting local economies. Growing interest in forests as relatively cost-effective nature-based climate solutions, particularly restoration and reforestation activities, has increased the demand for information on forest regrowth and...