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U.S. Department of the Interior
Historical aerial photography is an essential resource for change detection for time periods before the development of high-resolution satellite imagery. To support an assessment of the invasive Russian olive in the Escalante River system, historical aerial photography from July and August 1960 was obtained from the U.S Department of Agriculture Aerial Photography Field Office. The photography was scanned at 12 microns creating a file size of 375 MB.
In 2012, the USGS completed mapping historical wildfires (1972 to 2010) for the full Mojave bioregion of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah using Landsat data. This work documented wildfire information related to burn perimeters, severity, frequency, and post-fire vegetation characteristics, which is useful to local, State, and Federal land managers.
The semiarid western United States faces increasing water demands, focusing interest on hydroclimate, the past, present and future trends in climate with respect to water.
Vegetation structure plays an important role in the partitioning of energy, the movement and fate of water, and the provision of habitat. How vegetation structure changes as a function of climate (phenology) is of interest for climate, carbon cycling, hydrologic, and biologic modeling as well as resource management. Multiple sources of remotely sensed data are being used to develop metrics that provide insight into the changing phenology of vegetation in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia.
Information on the potential, locations, and mechanisms of carbon sequestration is essential in order to formulate carbon management and sequestration policies and strategies. This project fulfills the requirements of section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 by conducting a comprehensive assessment of the potential for carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions reductions from terrestrial ecosystems across the United States.
The greater Platte River Basins is an area that contains many fragile ecosystems that could be sensitive to changes in climate and land use. Geologic mapping of surficial deposits in the South Platte River in eastern Colorado and the Niobrara National Scenic River in northern Nebraska is underway to better understand the geologic framework of some of these ecosystems. The mapping, combined with geochronologic research, is key to understanding the timing and causes of landscape change in the two areas. National Aerial Photography Program (NAPP) color infrared photography, w
There is a growing consensus that natural disturbances will intensify under forecasted global climate change. The southwestern United States, for example, is expected to undergo both extended periods of drought and longer wildfire seasons. The temporal response of desert grassland communities to the effects of drought and fire is being examined using a time series of Landsat Thematic Mapper images from 1984-2011 (n = 309 scenes).
This research utilizes a combination of in situ and remote sensing technologies and algorithms to monitor the changing landscape of the Navajo Nation due to climatological influences. The Tribal land, equivalent in size to the State of West Virginia, is the least instrumented and least climatologically studied area of the United States.
The LandCarbon project is designed to fulfill the requirements of the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, Section 712, which mandated that the Department of Interior conduct an assessment of carbon storage, carbon sequestration, and fluxes of major greenhouse gases in and out of ecosystems across the Nation.
A preliminary height-above-ground (HAG) model utilizing over 350 billion light detection and ranging (lidar) points and Web-enabled Landsat Data (WELD) was created to predict heights based on an annual composite of 2009 Landsat data. A comparison of the predicted heights at 30-meter resolution compared to mean heights computed from lidar yielded promising results (r2 = 0.69, root mean square error (RMSE) of 4.1 meters). Further refinements of this model are planned for fiscal year 2014 to determine extensibility to other time periods, incorporate new lidar data into t
