The Earth contains an astonishing variety of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, that provide the biological resources and services essential to our survival. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with other organizations, is generating the datasets needed to better manage, conserve, and restore these vital natural resources that are increasingly threatened by fragmentation, alteration, loss, invasive species, fire, climate change, and incompatible resource extraction.
The Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a consortium of over 100 nations that seek to promote earth observation for solving some of society's most difficult problems, has commissioned much of this work under several of its initiatives. The GEO Global Ecosystem Initiative (GEO ECO), part of GEO’s Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), has been tasked to develop objective (data-derived) and management-appropriate global datasets to support the sustainability of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems.
Research Efforts:
Global data is being developed to provide a consistent and innovative classification and mapping of resources like ecosystems at a finer spatial resolution than any existing eco-regionalization of the planet.
Continental data efforts for South America, the United States, and Africa helped develop and refine the initial standardized terrestrial ecosystems approach that model’s ecosystem occurrences as unique physical environments with biotic and abiotic components.
Terrestrial Ecosystems of the Conterminous United States
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), with support from NatureServe, has modeled the potential distribution of 419 terrestrial ecosystems for the conterminous United States using a comprehensive biophysical stratification approach that identifies distinct biophysical environments and associates them with known vegetation distributions (Sayre and others, 2009). This standardized ecosystem...
Terrestrial ecosystems: Surficial lithology of the conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has generated a new classification of the lithology of surficial materials to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States. The ecosystems classification used in this effort was developed by NatureServe. A biophysical stratification...
Terrestrial Ecosystems - Land Surface Forms of the Conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated land surface form classes to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States, using an ecosystems classification developed by NatureServe . A biophysical stratification approach, developed for South America and now being implemented...
Terrestrial ecosystems - Isobioclimates of the conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated isobioclimate classes to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States, using an ecosystems classification developed by NatureServe . A biophysical stratification approach, developed for South America (Sayre and others, 2008) and...
Terrestrial Ecosystems - Topographic Moisture Potential of the Conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated topographic moisture potential classes to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States, using an ecosystems classification developed by NatureServe. A biophysical stratification approach, developed for South America and now being...
Filter Total Items: 15
Ecological Coastal Units – Standardized global shoreline characteristics
A new set of resources is now available that describe global shoreline characteristics. High resolution (30 m), globally comprehensive Coastal Segment Units (CSUs) and Ecological Coastal Units (ECUs) were developed in a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Esri, and the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON). The data were produced from a segmentation and...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright
Human populations in the world’s mountains: Spatio-temporal patterns and potential controls
Changing climate and human demographics in the world's mountains will have increasingly profound environmental and societal consequences across all elevations. Quantifying current human populations in and near mountains is crucial to ensure that any interventions in these complex social-ecological systems are appropriately resourced, and that valuable ecosystems are effectively protected...
Authors
James M. Thornton, Mark A. Snethlage, Roger Sayre, Davnah R. Urbach, Daniel Viviroli, Daniele Ehrlich, Veruska Muccione, Philippus Wester, Gregory Insarov, Carolina Adler
A global ecological classification of coastal segment units to complement marine biodiversity observation network assessments
A new data layer provides Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) labels for global coastal segments at 1 km or shorter resolution. These characteristics are summarized for six US Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) sites and one MBON Pole to Pole of the Americas site in Argentina. The global coastlines CMECS classifications were produced from a...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Madeline T. Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Tom Allen, Rebecca Allee, Rost Parsons, Bjorn Nyberg, Mark Costello, Peter Harris, Frank Muller-Karger
Earth's coastlines
With approximately half the world’s population living less than 65 miles from the ocean, coastal ecosystems are arguably Earth’s most critical real estate. Yet coastlines are among the more difficult features to accurately map; until now, no comprehensive high-resolution geospatial dataset existed. This chapter presents a new map and ecological inventory of global coastlines developed by...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline T. Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Tom Allen, Rebecca Allee, Rost Parsons, Bjorn Nyberg, Mark J. Costello, Frank Muller-Karger, Peter Harris
The geography of islands
Islands come in all shapes, sizes and types, from tiny rocky outcrops, to enormous continental landmasses. The true number of islands distributed in the planet’s seas and oceans is still elusive. Recent efforts bolstered by an abundance of detailed satellite imagery and the sophistication of geographic information systems (GIS) are bringing real answers to those questions closer than...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline Thomas Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Nick Holmes, Osgur McDermott-Long, Lauren Weatherdon, Dena Spatz, Keith VanGraafeiland, David Will
Global islands
A new map of global islands at a high spatial resolution (30 m) has been produced from a semi-automated interpretation of 2014 satellite imagery. The data are available in the public domain. The islands were classified by size into continental mainlands (5), big islands > 1 km2 (21,818), and small islands ≤ 1 km2 (318,868). The new high-resolution islands data are intended to support...
Authors
Madeline Thomas Martin, Roger Sayre, Keith Van Graafeiland, Osgur McDermott-Long, Lauren Weatherdon, David Will, Dena R. Spatz, Nicholas Holmes
An assessment of the representation of ecosystems in global protected areas using new maps of World Climate Regions and World Ecosystems
Representation of ecosystems in protected area networks and conservation strategies is a core principle of global conservation priority setting approaches and a commitment in Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly call for the conservation of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. Accurate ecosystem...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Timothy Boucher, Nicholas Wolff, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Madeline T. Martin, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Jerry Touval, Leonardo Sotomayor, Jennifer McGowan, Edward T. Game, Hugh P. Possingham
The Islands of Oceania – Political geography, biogeography, and terrestrial ecosystems
Humans are dependent upon ecosystems for the production of goods and services necessary for their well-being (Daily, 1997). As the service provider units (SPUs) for these benefits of nature (Anderson et al., 2015), ecosystems need to be managed in a way that maximizes their persistence on the planet. Part of that management effort includes knowing a) what the ecosystem types are, b)...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline Thomas Martin, Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Simone Maynard
A new 30 meter resolution global shoreline vector and associated global islands database for the development of standardized ecological coastal units
A new 30-m spatial resolution global shoreline vector (GSV) was developed from annual composites of 2014 Landsat satellite imagery. The semi-automated classification of the imagery was accomplished by manual selection of training points representing water and non-water classes along the entire global coastline. Polygon topology was applied to the GSV, resulting in a new characterisation...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Suzanne Noble, Sharon L. Hamann, Rebecca A. Smith, Dawn J. Wright, Sean P. Breyer, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Dabney Hopkins, Drew Stephens, Kevin Kelly, Zeenatul Basher, Devon Burton, Jill Janene Cress, Karina Atkins, D. Paco Van Sistine, Beverly Friesen, Rebecca Allee, Tom Allen, Peter Aniello, Irawan Asaad, Mark John Costello, Kathy Goodin, Peter Harrison, Maria T. Kavanaugh, Helen Lillis, Eleonora Manca, Frank E. Muller-Karger, Bjorn Nyberg, Rost Parsons, Justin Saarinen, Jac Steiner, Adam Reed
A new high-resolution map of world mountains and an online tool for visualizing and comparing characterizations of global mountain distributions
Answers to the seemingly straightforward questions “what is a mountain?” and “where are the mountains of the world?” are in fact quite complex, and there have been few attempts to map the mountains of the earth in a consistent and rigorous fashion. However, knowing exactly where mountain ecosystems are distributed on the planet is a precursor to conserving them, as called for in...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Jürg Krauer, Sean Breyer, Peter Aniello, Dawn J. Wright, Davnah Payne, Carolina Adler, Harumi Warner, D. Paco Van Sistine, Jill Janene Cress
Monitoring mountains in a changing world: New horizons for the Global Network for Observations and Information on Mountain Environments (GEO-GNOME)
Mountains are globally distributed environments that provide significant societal benefits, a function that is increasingly compromised by climatic change, environmental stress, political and socioeconomic transformations, and unsustainable use of natural resources. Gaps in our understanding of these processes and their interactions limit our capacity to inform decisions, where both...
Authors
Carolina Adler, Elisa Palazzi, Aino Kulonen, Jörg Balsiger, Guido Colangeli, Douglas Cripe, Nathan Forsythe, Grace Goss-Durant, Yaniss Guigoz, Jürg Krauer, Davnah Payne, Nicholas Pepin, Manuel Peralvo, José Romero, Roger Sayre, Maria Shahgedanova, Rolf Weingartner, Marc Zebisch
Modeling global Hammond landform regions from 250-m elevation data
In 1964, E.H. Hammond proposed criteria for classifying and mapping physiographic regions of the United States. Hammond produced a map entitled “Classes of Land Surface Form in the Forty-Eight States, USA”, which is regarded as a pioneering and rigorous treatment of regional physiography. Several researchers automated Hammond?s model in GIS. However, these were local or regional in...
Authors
Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Roger Sayre, Sean P. Breyer, Peter Aniello, Randy Vaughan, Dawn J. Wright
The Earth contains an astonishing variety of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems, that provide the biological resources and services essential to our survival. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with other organizations, is generating the datasets needed to better manage, conserve, and restore these vital natural resources that are increasingly threatened by fragmentation, alteration, loss, invasive species, fire, climate change, and incompatible resource extraction.
The Group on Earth Observations (GEO), a consortium of over 100 nations that seek to promote earth observation for solving some of society's most difficult problems, has commissioned much of this work under several of its initiatives. The GEO Global Ecosystem Initiative (GEO ECO), part of GEO’s Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), has been tasked to develop objective (data-derived) and management-appropriate global datasets to support the sustainability of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems.
Research Efforts:
Global data is being developed to provide a consistent and innovative classification and mapping of resources like ecosystems at a finer spatial resolution than any existing eco-regionalization of the planet.
Continental data efforts for South America, the United States, and Africa helped develop and refine the initial standardized terrestrial ecosystems approach that model’s ecosystem occurrences as unique physical environments with biotic and abiotic components.
Terrestrial Ecosystems of the Conterminous United States
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), with support from NatureServe, has modeled the potential distribution of 419 terrestrial ecosystems for the conterminous United States using a comprehensive biophysical stratification approach that identifies distinct biophysical environments and associates them with known vegetation distributions (Sayre and others, 2009). This standardized ecosystem...
Terrestrial ecosystems: Surficial lithology of the conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has generated a new classification of the lithology of surficial materials to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States. The ecosystems classification used in this effort was developed by NatureServe. A biophysical stratification...
Terrestrial Ecosystems - Land Surface Forms of the Conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated land surface form classes to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States, using an ecosystems classification developed by NatureServe . A biophysical stratification approach, developed for South America and now being implemented...
Terrestrial ecosystems - Isobioclimates of the conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated isobioclimate classes to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States, using an ecosystems classification developed by NatureServe . A biophysical stratification approach, developed for South America (Sayre and others, 2008) and...
Terrestrial Ecosystems - Topographic Moisture Potential of the Conterminous United States
As part of an effort to map terrestrial ecosystems, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated topographic moisture potential classes to be used in creating maps depicting standardized, terrestrial ecosystem models for the conterminous United States, using an ecosystems classification developed by NatureServe. A biophysical stratification approach, developed for South America and now being...
Filter Total Items: 15
Ecological Coastal Units – Standardized global shoreline characteristics
A new set of resources is now available that describe global shoreline characteristics. High resolution (30 m), globally comprehensive Coastal Segment Units (CSUs) and Ecological Coastal Units (ECUs) were developed in a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Esri, and the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON). The data were produced from a segmentation and...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright
Human populations in the world’s mountains: Spatio-temporal patterns and potential controls
Changing climate and human demographics in the world's mountains will have increasingly profound environmental and societal consequences across all elevations. Quantifying current human populations in and near mountains is crucial to ensure that any interventions in these complex social-ecological systems are appropriately resourced, and that valuable ecosystems are effectively protected...
Authors
James M. Thornton, Mark A. Snethlage, Roger Sayre, Davnah R. Urbach, Daniel Viviroli, Daniele Ehrlich, Veruska Muccione, Philippus Wester, Gregory Insarov, Carolina Adler
A global ecological classification of coastal segment units to complement marine biodiversity observation network assessments
A new data layer provides Coastal and Marine Ecological Classification Standard (CMECS) labels for global coastal segments at 1 km or shorter resolution. These characteristics are summarized for six US Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) sites and one MBON Pole to Pole of the Americas site in Argentina. The global coastlines CMECS classifications were produced from a...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Madeline T. Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Tom Allen, Rebecca Allee, Rost Parsons, Bjorn Nyberg, Mark Costello, Peter Harris, Frank Muller-Karger
Earth's coastlines
With approximately half the world’s population living less than 65 miles from the ocean, coastal ecosystems are arguably Earth’s most critical real estate. Yet coastlines are among the more difficult features to accurately map; until now, no comprehensive high-resolution geospatial dataset existed. This chapter presents a new map and ecological inventory of global coastlines developed by...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline T. Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Tom Allen, Rebecca Allee, Rost Parsons, Bjorn Nyberg, Mark J. Costello, Frank Muller-Karger, Peter Harris
The geography of islands
Islands come in all shapes, sizes and types, from tiny rocky outcrops, to enormous continental landmasses. The true number of islands distributed in the planet’s seas and oceans is still elusive. Recent efforts bolstered by an abundance of detailed satellite imagery and the sophistication of geographic information systems (GIS) are bringing real answers to those questions closer than...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline Thomas Martin, Jill Janene Cress, Nick Holmes, Osgur McDermott-Long, Lauren Weatherdon, Dena Spatz, Keith VanGraafeiland, David Will
Global islands
A new map of global islands at a high spatial resolution (30 m) has been produced from a semi-automated interpretation of 2014 satellite imagery. The data are available in the public domain. The islands were classified by size into continental mainlands (5), big islands > 1 km2 (21,818), and small islands ≤ 1 km2 (318,868). The new high-resolution islands data are intended to support...
Authors
Madeline Thomas Martin, Roger Sayre, Keith Van Graafeiland, Osgur McDermott-Long, Lauren Weatherdon, David Will, Dena R. Spatz, Nicholas Holmes
An assessment of the representation of ecosystems in global protected areas using new maps of World Climate Regions and World Ecosystems
Representation of ecosystems in protected area networks and conservation strategies is a core principle of global conservation priority setting approaches and a commitment in Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly call for the conservation of terrestrial, freshwater, and marine ecosystems. Accurate ecosystem...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Timothy Boucher, Nicholas Wolff, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Madeline T. Martin, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Jerry Touval, Leonardo Sotomayor, Jennifer McGowan, Edward T. Game, Hugh P. Possingham
The Islands of Oceania – Political geography, biogeography, and terrestrial ecosystems
Humans are dependent upon ecosystems for the production of goods and services necessary for their well-being (Daily, 1997). As the service provider units (SPUs) for these benefits of nature (Anderson et al., 2015), ecosystems need to be managed in a way that maximizes their persistence on the planet. Part of that management effort includes knowing a) what the ecosystem types are, b)...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Madeline Thomas Martin, Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Sean Breyer, Dawn Wright, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Simone Maynard
A new 30 meter resolution global shoreline vector and associated global islands database for the development of standardized ecological coastal units
A new 30-m spatial resolution global shoreline vector (GSV) was developed from annual composites of 2014 Landsat satellite imagery. The semi-automated classification of the imagery was accomplished by manual selection of training points representing water and non-water classes along the entire global coastline. Polygon topology was applied to the GSV, resulting in a new characterisation...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Suzanne Noble, Sharon L. Hamann, Rebecca A. Smith, Dawn J. Wright, Sean P. Breyer, Kevin Butler, Keith Van Graafeiland, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Dabney Hopkins, Drew Stephens, Kevin Kelly, Zeenatul Basher, Devon Burton, Jill Janene Cress, Karina Atkins, D. Paco Van Sistine, Beverly Friesen, Rebecca Allee, Tom Allen, Peter Aniello, Irawan Asaad, Mark John Costello, Kathy Goodin, Peter Harrison, Maria T. Kavanaugh, Helen Lillis, Eleonora Manca, Frank E. Muller-Karger, Bjorn Nyberg, Rost Parsons, Justin Saarinen, Jac Steiner, Adam Reed
A new high-resolution map of world mountains and an online tool for visualizing and comparing characterizations of global mountain distributions
Answers to the seemingly straightforward questions “what is a mountain?” and “where are the mountains of the world?” are in fact quite complex, and there have been few attempts to map the mountains of the earth in a consistent and rigorous fashion. However, knowing exactly where mountain ecosystems are distributed on the planet is a precursor to conserving them, as called for in...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Charlie Frye, Deniz Karagulle, Jürg Krauer, Sean Breyer, Peter Aniello, Dawn J. Wright, Davnah Payne, Carolina Adler, Harumi Warner, D. Paco Van Sistine, Jill Janene Cress
Monitoring mountains in a changing world: New horizons for the Global Network for Observations and Information on Mountain Environments (GEO-GNOME)
Mountains are globally distributed environments that provide significant societal benefits, a function that is increasingly compromised by climatic change, environmental stress, political and socioeconomic transformations, and unsustainable use of natural resources. Gaps in our understanding of these processes and their interactions limit our capacity to inform decisions, where both...
Authors
Carolina Adler, Elisa Palazzi, Aino Kulonen, Jörg Balsiger, Guido Colangeli, Douglas Cripe, Nathan Forsythe, Grace Goss-Durant, Yaniss Guigoz, Jürg Krauer, Davnah Payne, Nicholas Pepin, Manuel Peralvo, José Romero, Roger Sayre, Maria Shahgedanova, Rolf Weingartner, Marc Zebisch
Modeling global Hammond landform regions from 250-m elevation data
In 1964, E.H. Hammond proposed criteria for classifying and mapping physiographic regions of the United States. Hammond produced a map entitled “Classes of Land Surface Form in the Forty-Eight States, USA”, which is regarded as a pioneering and rigorous treatment of regional physiography. Several researchers automated Hammond?s model in GIS. However, these were local or regional in...
Authors
Deniz Karagulle, Charlie Frye, Roger Sayre, Sean P. Breyer, Peter Aniello, Randy Vaughan, Dawn J. Wright