USGS Submissions

Land surface phenology is a crucial link between climate and natural resources. The Department of Interior (DOI) North Central Climate Science Center (NC CSC) has partnered with the AmericaView program to establish phenology cameras, or “PhenoCams,”  at strategic locations throughout the north-central U.S.  These fixed cameras transmit an image of the landscape to an online server every 30 minutes during daylight hours.  Both raw imagery as well as derived metrics of vegetation greenness are freely available through the National PhenoCam Network website.

The Wildland Fuels Research project at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center seeks to develop novel applications of remotely sensed data to better quantify and map wildland fuels in support of wildfire planning and response.  A new initiative has begun in collaboration with the Superior National Forest (SNF) in northern Minnesota to quantify understory fuels using airborne lidar data.  In many areas of the SNF, small balsam fir trees make up a substantial portion of the understory vegetation and contribute to fire behavior when these areas burn.  However, ex

In the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, the use of winter cover crops on agricultural land has been identified as a priority conservation practice for improving soil health and reducing the loss of nutrients and sediment from farmland. Winter cover crops (such as rye, barley, wheat, and radish) are planted in the fall, following the harvest of summer row crops (such as corn, soybean, vegetables). The cover crops are typically killed the following spring to release nutrients for the subsequent cash crop.

Shrub and grassland ecosystems in the western United States are especially prone to fire events, yet available data for assessing fire risk in these areas are inadequate.  Part of the difficulty in effectively characterizing shrub and grasslands for fire applications is related to the high degree of intra- and inter-annual variability of fuel characteristics in these ecosystems.  A better understanding of the dynamics of these ecosystems and the conditions that promote wildfires needs to be developed.  This information is of special importance to projects that are providing f

The coastal marsh within Barataria Bay on the western side of the Mississippi River Delta was heavily impacted by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) and field data were collected near-concurrently in the summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012 in the north-central Gulf of Mexico to assess the condition of coastal marshes, including Barataria Bay.  PolSAR data alone were collected in 2009.

On the San Carlos Apache Reservation in east-central Arizona, vegetation types such as ponderosa pine forests, pinyon-juniper woodlands, and grasslands have important ecological, cultural, and economic value for the Tribe. This value extends beyond the Tribal lands and across the western United States. Vegetation across the southwestern United States is susceptible to drought conditions and fluctuating water availability. Remotely sensed vegetation indices can be used to measure and monitor spatial and temporal vegetative response to these water and drought dynamics.

In March 2011, USGS and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) biologists conducted a pilot project designed to estimate the abundance of sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) at one roost at the Monte Vista National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado. The Refuge is an important fall and spring migration area for sandhill cranes; almost the entire Rocky Mountain population stages there every spring.

Little is known about the movements, habitat use, and causes of mortality of common loons during their first few years.  To address this knowledge gap, scientists with the USGS Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and partners captured and radiomarked juvenile common loons on lakes scattered across Minnesota and Wisconsin during the summers of 2014 and 2015.

Millions of landbirds migrate through the Gulf of Mexico region each spring and autumn. Migration is energetically taxing, and these migrants depend on stopover habitats to provide the food and cover needed to complete their journey. For some species, as much as 85% of annual mortality occurs during migration. Stopover habitats in the Gulf of Mexico region have been lost or degraded due to the effects of development, agriculture, livestock grazing, timber industry activities, and the spread of exotic species.

To facilitate the recovery of federally endangered wolves (Canis lupus), it is critical to learn as much as possible about their behavior and habitat use. The direct study of wolves is difficult, however, due to their avoidance of humans and the inaccessibility of their wilderness territories.  The USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center uses Very High Frequency (VHF) and/or Global Positioning System (GPS) radio collars to locate and monitor wolves in three areas to investigate their movements, ecology, and population.