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The island of Puerto Rico is subject to numerous natural hazards including hurricanes, coastal erosion, and flooding. Information on how the island’s coastal environments respond to these events is critical for bolstering coastal resilience.

Conventional, field-based streamflow monitoring in remote, inaccessible locations such as Alaska poses logistical challenges and make remote sensing an appealing alternative means of collecting hydrologic data.

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

BOEM, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey are collaborating to foster research on deep learning methods that automate remote sensing data for wildlife population surveys. The Atlantic Marine Assessment Program for Protected Species (AMAPPS), in its third phase, is developing automated ways to rapidly filter and subset digital aerial imagery of marine birds, cetaceans, and sea turtles.

Imagery collected using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are being used to document baseline vegetation conditions and to monitor progress of bottomland forest restoration at the Little Saint Francis River, Missouri.

As part of a Natural Resource Damage Assessment settlement related to contaminant releases from the Molycorp/Questa Molybdenum mine, subalpine fens, wetlands, and associated stream habitat for the native Rio Grande cutthroat trout are being restored in high-altitude headwaters of Bitter Creek, New Mexico.

The USGS National Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Project Office, the USGS Cascades Volcano Center, and Department of the Interior (DOI) Office of Aviation Services (OAS) trained personnel and equipment were deployed on May 17, 2018, to support the remote sensing data acquisition needed for monitoring eruptions of the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii.

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.

The substantial damage that Hurricane Sandy inflicted on coastal communities and surrounding wetlands resulted primarily from an associated storm surge of record extent and impact.  In the hardest hit area, Federal lands, national parks, and wildlife refuges are interspersed  with a dense urban landscape where the impact to estuaries, wetlands, and coastal forests is more diffuse and difficult to quantify spatially without the aid of aerial photographic and satellite imagery.  Access points to these land units and natural resources adjoining roads showed wide-area tree mortal

Coastal marine fog is an important meteorological phenomenon impacting some of the most populous cities and biodiverse regions of the world. Fog is an important resource along the western coasts of the continents, especially in North America (including California), South America from Ecuador to Chile, and Africa from the Canary Islands to South Africa. Satellite remote sensing data can capture the incursion of this marine layer.