USGS Submissions

Wolves are born into packs. Similar to the dynamics of human families, young members of both sexes leave their natal families as they reach maturity and strike out on their own.  These “lone wolves” travel far and wide seeking a mate and new territory.  In northeastern Minnesota’s saturated wolf population, few areas are unclaimed by existing wolf packs, so lone dispersing wolves often “float” within the populations for long periods.

The GeoCLIM climate analysis tool and the Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) rainfall dataset were developed to support a request from the U.S.

In 2017, the National Park Service approached the USGS National Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Project Office to acquire geospatial data in support of developing a flood management plan for the Fort Laramie National Historic Site, Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Originally established as a private fur trading fort in 1834, Fort Laramie evolved into the largest military post on the northern plains and eventually became part of the National Park System in 1938.

Accurate assessment of ongoing land subsidence and ground failure requires periodic imaging of the ground surface and reconstruction of topographic changes over multiple timescales. The USGS monitors active land-surface deformation of playas occupying Red Pass and Bicycle Basins in the Mojave Desert to evaluate the influence of tectonic stress, fault barriers to groundwater flow, and declining groundwater levels due to pumping in nearby wells.

Wildfire activity in Alaskan boreal forests has been increasing in extent and frequency over the past two decades.  These shifts have critical consequences for future fire and resource management since fire is a dominant driver of numerous interrelated aspects of the boreal environment, such as soil erosion, permafrost dynamics, carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat availability, the rate and nature of vegetation recovery, and the provision of subsistence resources.  The potential for

Scientists at the USGS Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center in Denver, Colorado, have led the development and validation of the Landsat Burned Area products. The algorithm producing the products identifies burned areas in Landsat images that have a spatial resolution of 30 meters (m) and a temporal resolution of 16 days or more, depending on cloud cover. Fires are frequently unreported; consequently, existing fire databases are often incomplete.

The Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE) Program developed the original LANDFIRE National product suite using Landsat data (circa 2001) to identify disturbances on the landscape. Although these products were updated regularly (LF 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014), the base layers themselves are now more than 15 years old. To make the base data current, LANDFIRE is remapping the United States to produce a new product suite.

Static fuel model layers that represent average fire conditions do not capture the dynamic changes in fuel availability that can occur from one year to another and across seasons.

The 2018 eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in the Hawaiian islands is historically unprecedented in many ways, with explosions and repetitive large-scale collapse events at the volcano’s summit and voluminous lava output in the Lower East Rift Zone (LERZ) that has strongly impacted communities in the lower district of Puna. Additionally, it marks the Federal Government’s first UAS response to a volcanic eruption.

The potential for gravitational and explosion-driven collapse is one of the greatest hazards of lava dome eruptions.  Topographic modeling of active lava domes is useful for detecting changes that may influence collapse or explosive activity. It also provides constraints on the volume of potentially collapsible material, a key parameter of effective hazard assessment.