NPS

Snow cover strongly influences the energy budget and regional climate of higher latitudes and elevations. The seasonal freeze-thaw (FT) transition is coupled with snowpack melt dynamics and impacts ecological processes, surface-water mobility, and the energy budget. However, understanding of the seasonal transition in the Arctic and boreal region (ABR) is constrained by the sparse distribution of regional weather stations and in-situ observations.

The Everglades National Park (EVER) and Big Cypress National Preserve (BICY) vegetation mapping project is a component of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). The CERP is a cooperative effort between the South Florida Water Management District, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), and the NPS Vegetation Inventory Program (VIP), with funding provided by the NPS VIP and the USACE.

The NPS contracted with ABR, Inc., to develop a map that depicts the day of the year that a Landsat 30-meter pixel becomes snow free during the spring from 1999 to 2015.  Annual coverage is available from 2010 to 2015. The project also includes mapping lichen distribution across a large swath of east-central Alaska and the Yukon.

The NPS is using the entire Landsat 30-meter resolution data archive (1980s to the present) to study changes in the total surface area of lakes and ponds in the national parks of northern and central Alaska. A NPS research team used tiled surface reflectance data from the U.S. Geological Survey's U.S. Landsat Analysis Ready Data to map water bodies.

Snowmelt and rain-on-snow (ROS) events enhance the liquid water content of a snowpack, which affects snow properties such as depth, density, grain size, and extent. These changes are associated with transfers of latent and sensible heat and create a positive feedback that accelerates snowmelt processes.

There are 88 NPS park units designated as Ocean and Coastal Parks that encompass 11,000 shoreline miles and 2.5 million acres of ocean and Great Lakes waters.  Due to the large and complex nature of these park units, managing natural and cultural resources can be difficult. Benthic (meaning ocean floor or lake bottom) habitat maps are a spatially explicit way to identify submerged features.