Data and Information Assets

This proposal would fund the testing of quantitative methods for extracting total water level from imagery, with add-on applications including satellite shoreline detection, digital stream gauges, and flood detection. This project supports national scale USGS coastal hazards products.

This project develops an approach to common questions USGS scientists are faced with when working on multidisciplinary teams to address complex challenges — what models are available? When is it appropriate to couple/integrate models? And how can we apply technology to support an appropriate approach?

Scientists who study coastal ecosystems and hazards such as hurricanes, flooding, and cliff failure collect lots of photographs of coastal environments from airplanes and drones. A large area can be surveyed at high resolution and low cost. Additionally, satellites such as Landsat have provided imagery of the Nation’s coastlines every few days for decades. Scientist’s ability to understand coastal

To make informed decisions, land managers require knowledge about the state of the ecosystems present. Vegetation structure is a key indicator of the state of forested systems; it influences habitat suitability, water quality and runoff, microclimate, and informs wildfire-related characteristics such as fuel loads, burn severity, and post-fire regeneration. Field data used to derive vegetation st

Fire has increased dramatically across the western U.S. and these increases are expected to continue. With this reality, it is critical that we improve our ability to forecast the timing, extent, and intensity of fire to provide resource managers and policy makers the information needed for effective decisions. For example, an advanced, spatially-explicit prediction of the upcoming fire season wou

Wildfires are increasing across the western U.S., causing damage to ecosystems and communities. Addressing the fire problem requires understanding the trends and drivers of fire, yet most fire data is limited only to recent decades. Tree-ring fire scars provide fire records spanning 300-500 years, yet these data are largely inaccessible to potential users. Our project will deliver the newly compil

Detailed information about past fire history is critical for understanding fire impacts and risk, as well as prioritizing conservation and fire management actions. Yet, fire history information is neither consistently nor routinely tracked by many agencies and states, especially on private lands in the Southeast. Remote sensing data products offer opportunities to do so but require additional pr

Drought is a major problem in the American Southwest that is expected to worsen under the effects of climate change. Currently, the Southwest Biological Science Center is monitoring the effects of drought with soil moisture probes in a range of ecosystems across an elevational gradient on the Colorado Plateau. These data are used in multiple studies to analyze the effects of drought on vegetation

The USGS maintains an extensive monitoring network throughout the United States in order to protect the public and help manage natural resources. This network generates millions of data points each year, all of which must be evaluated and reviewed manually for quality assurance and control. Sensor malfunctions and issues can result in data losses and unexpected costs, and are typically only notice

We aim to migrate our research workflow from a closed system to an open framework, increasing flexibility and transparency in our science and accessibility of our data. Our hyperspectral data of agricultural crops are crucial for training/ validating machine learning algorithms to study food security, land use, etc. Generating such data is resource-intensive and requires expertise, proprietary

A unique opportunity for USGS to collaborate with IRIS-PASSCAL (the national seismic instrument facility) has presented itself to develop a geophysical data archive format that follows FAIR principles. IRIS-PASSCAL is extending facility to include magnetotelluric (MT) instruments prescribing the need for them to archive collected MT data by extending their existing protocol. Concurrently, Congre

Many coastal areas are experiencing departures from normal conditions due to changing land use and climate patterns, including increased frequency, severity, or duration of floods and droughts, in some cases combinations of the two. To address these issues, the U.S. Geological Survey developed the Coastal Salinity Index (CSI) to identify and communicate fluctuating salinity conditions due to such