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U.S. Department of the Interior
This river corridor assessment documents sediment mobility, vegetation change, and river response to flood disturbance along a 140-kilometer segment of the main-stem Klamath River below Iron Gate Dam, California.
Remote sensing research is used in the culturally, ecologically, and topographically complex transboundary United States/Mexico ecoregions to provide scientific support for land management decisions. Managing species and habitats across borders presents unique conservation challenges.
In Prince William Sound in southern Alaska, climate change–driven glacial retreat is exposing steep, unstable slopes that could generate tsunamis if they failed rapidly and entered the fjords. One such area is the Barry Arm fjord, where the rapid retreat and thinning of the Barry Glacier is associated with several slope instabilities that threaten nearby communities, infrastructure, and marine interests.
USGS is co-producing research on the science and adaptive management of recovering burned areas in sagebrush steppe and the response of those areas to restoration interventions. Landsat, Sentinel, and USGS vegetation mapping products derived from them are key data inputs. Multiple publications have resulted from this work, which is funded entirely from the BLM and FWS.
The Department of Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire (OWF), in partnership with the USGS, is conducting evaluations to determine best practices and methodology for data collection of post-fire eve
The 2012 Pole Creek Fire in the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon continues to provide an exceptional opportunity to study wildland fire effects with remote sensing data. This project builds upon wildland fire remote sensing research by addressing novel questions through the analysis of pre-fire, post-fire, and a new 8+ year post-fire forest recovery lidar acquisition.
Tens of millions of trees reportedly died in California during the 2012–2016 drought, resulting in marked increases in heavy fuel loads on the landscape. In conjunction with warming temperatures, drier conditions, and over a century of fire suppression, the accumulation of fuel can result in catastrophic fires that are beyond the predictive capacity of traditional fire behavior models.
A 2021 high-resolution image collection is the most recent in a rich archive of aerial imagery used to track changes of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The imagery was acquired from an airplane in Grand Canyon National Park along the Colorado River corridor and the Little Colorado River starting Memorial Day weekend and continuing through the first week of June 2021.
Barrier islands are dynamic environments that can evolve with currents, waves, and tides. These systems help with storm surge reduction and wave attenuation but accelerated sea-level rise and more frequent and intense storms are expected to drastically change these islands in the future.
The western U.S., including California, has experienced extreme weather events that have resulted in catastrophic and deadly fires. These destructive fires have resulted in loss of life and property, and burned through iconic landscapes within the National Park Service (NPS). This ongoing project measures the impact and landscape response of these fires on three national parks in California.
