Thermal

Many wildlife species reside in sensitive habitats that make detection and monitoring difficult.  For waterfowl, measuring brood production can serve as an early indicator of habitat quality and provide important insight into understanding overall ecosystem drivers.

The Delaware River Basin is an important water resource for Philadelphia and other cities in the region. It was chosen to demonstrate USGS’s model integration efforts to investigate the relationships among water use, land cover, and climate to assess and forecast the impact of changes in these parameters on the environment and water resources.

The intersection of land use, water use, water availability, and climate change demands attention as resource constraints increasingly threaten human health and welfare. Long-term analyses of historical-to-current feedbacks among land use, water resources, and climate may support managers’ ability to anticipate potential feedbacks that could threaten human activities in the future.

USGS researchers in the Water Resources Mission Area are partnering with NASA and the University of Southern California (USC) to measure stream surface velocity using a spectrum of sensors and edge-computing tools carried on Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS).

This project uses aerial imagery collected with Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS, or “drones”) to assess and monitor vegetation at contaminated wetlands and neighboring lands being remediated and restored under the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative

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 USGS Water Availability and Use Science Program (WAUSP) systematically provides information that allows water resource managers to assess availability o

Climate-related impacts on food security and water availability continue to affect many parts of the globe.  Several regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, are not only susceptible to these impacts, but also lack the ability to monitor climate-related risk.  Earth observation (EO) satellites have been instrumental in offering large-scale monitoring capabilities for analysis of rainfall, evapotranspiration, vegetation

The Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve (JELA) in southeastern Louisiana is being invaded by feral hogs (Sus scrofa) and needs a systemic survey to determine the distribution and number of hogs that exist within the park boundary.

The estimation and mapping of evapotranspiration (ET) is an active area of applied USGS research in the fields of agriculture and water resources. Specifically, combining remote sensing data along with climate and other weather information in a cloud-based compute framework has illustrated the value of next-generation ET mapping for nationwide water use information.