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. Early and comprehensive detection of duckling production and brood counts can inform recreational hunting, ecosystem function, and community composition.

Provisional actual evapotranspiration (ETa) products derived from Landsat and weather data are now available for public download at a global extent for all Landsat data from 1984 onward. Landsat ETa is crucial for measuring water use and critical hydrologic components of the water budget for agricultural and natural landscapes at a higher spatial resolution.

Actual evapotranspiration (ET) estimation using remote sensing and weather data is an active research activity by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientists interested in delivering consistent and useful nationwide ET information. This information is important when measuring critical hydrologic components of the water budget for agricultural and natural landscapes across space and time.

The USGS Land Change, Monitoring, Assessments, and Projections (LCMAP) project was instituted to monitor and assess land use and land cover change through time, promote understanding of the causes and consequences of land change, and offer insight into the interactions between land change and climate change. LCMAP utilizes all available observations produced by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat Program to monitor change and to produce annual land change products.

The conversion of natural land cover to built-up surfaces has been widely documented as the main determinant of warming across urban areas, since buildings, roads, and other infrastructure absorb and reemit heat from the Sun more than natural landscapes. This land conversion process influences both canopy and surface urban heat intensities, resulting in urban heat islands (UHIs).

The potential implications of climate change on Pacific salmon are a concern to resource managers in Alaska as warming trends continue in high-latitude streams. Temperature monitoring is needed to assess the potential ecological changes to salmon spawning habitat in coldwater refugia streams. The Funny River and Moose River are two coldwater streams on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge that support a variety of salmon species.

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).