Publications
Below is a list of the most recent EROS peer-reviewed scientific papers, reports, fact sheets, and other publications. You can search all our publication holdings by type, topic, year, and order.
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Filter Total Items: 2456
Assessing future risks to agricultural productivity, water resources and food security: How can remote sensing help?
Although global food production has been rising, the world sti ll faces a major food security challenge. Over one billion people are currently undernourished (Wheeler and Kay, 2010). By the 2050s, the human population is projected to grow to 9.1 billion. Over three-quarters of these people will be living in developing countries, in regions that already lack the capacity to feed their populations .
Authors
Prasad S. Thenkabail, Jerry W. Knox, Mutlu Ozdogan, Murali Krishna Gumma, Russell G. Congalton, Zhuoting Wu, Cristina Milesi, Alex Finkral, Mike Marshall, Isabella Mariotto, Songcai You, Chandra Giri, Pamela Nagler
A multi-sensor lidar, multi-spectral and multi-angular approach for mapping canopy height in boreal forest regions
Spatially explicit representations of vegetation canopy height over large regions are necessary for a wide variety of inventory, monitoring, and modeling activities. Although airborne lidar data has been successfully used to develop vegetation canopy height maps in many regions, for vast, sparsely populated regions such as the boreal forest biome, airborne lidar is not widely available. An alterna
Authors
David J. Selkowitz, Gordon Green, Birgit E. Peterson, Bruce Wylie
Mapping grasslands suitable for cellulosic biofuels in the Greater Platte River Basin, United States
Biofuels are an important component in the development of alternative energy supplies, which is needed to achieve national energy independence and security in the United States. The most common biofuel product today in the United States is corn-based ethanol; however, its development is limited because of concerns about global food shortages, livestock and food price increases, and water demand in
Authors
Bruce K. Wylie, Yingxin Gu
United States Geological Survey fire science: Fire danger monitoring and forecasting
Each day, the U.S. Geological Survey produces 7-day forecasts for all Federal lands of the distributions of number of ignitions, number of fires above a given size, and conditional probabilities of fires growing larger than a specified size. The large fire probability map is an estimate of the likelihood that ignitions will become large fires. The large fire forecast map is a probability estimate
Authors
Jeff C. Eidenshink, Stephen M. Howard
Generation of a U.S. national urban land use product
Characterization of urban land uses is essential for many applications. However, differentiating among thematically-detailed urban land uses (residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, recreational, etc.) over broad areas is challenging, in part because image-based solutions are not ideal for establishing the contextual basis for identifying economic function and use. At present no curren
Authors
James A. Falcone, Collin G. Homer
The driving forces of land change in the Northern Piedmont of the United States
Driving forces facilitate or inhibit land-use/land-cover change. Human driving forces include political, economic, cultural, and social attributes that often change across time and space. Remotely sensed imagery provides regional land-change data for the Northern Piedmont, an ecoregion of the United States that continued to urbanize after 1970 through conversion of agricultural and forest land cov
Authors
Roger F. Auch, Darrell E. Napton, Steven Kambly, Thomas R. Moreland, Kristi Sayler
A climate trend analysis of Senegal
This brief report, drawing from a multi-year effort by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), identifies modest declines in rainfall, accompanied by increases in air temperatures. These analyses are based on quality-controlled station observations. Conclusions: * Summer rains have remained steady in Senegal over the past 20 years but
Authors
Christopher C. Funk, Jim Rowland, Alkhalil Adoum, Gary Eilerts, James Verdin, Libby White
2011 Year in review - Earth Resources Observation and Science Center
The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center's 2011 Year in Review is an annual report recounting the broad scope of the Center's 2011 accomplishments. The report covers preparations for the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) launch, the ever-increasing use of free Landsat data, monitoring the effects of natural hazards, and more to emphasize the importance of innovation in u
Dark and background response stability for the Landsat 8 Thermal Infrared Sensor
The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) is a pushbroom sensor that will be a part of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), which is a joint mission between NASA and the USGS. The TIRS instrument will continue to collect the thermal infrared data that are currently being collected by the Thematic Mapper and the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus on Landsats 5 and 7, respectively. One of the key require
Authors
Kelly Vanderwerff, Matthew Montanaro
Scenarios of land use and land cover change in the conterminous United States: Utilizing the special report on emission scenarios at ecoregional scales
Global environmental change scenarios have typically provided projections of land use and land cover for a relatively small number of regions or using a relatively coarse resolution spatial grid, and for only a few major sectors. The coarseness of global projections, in both spatial and thematic dimensions, often limits their direct utility at scales useful for environmental management. This paper
Authors
Benjamin M. Sleeter, Terry L. Sohl, Michelle A. Bouchard, Ryan R. Reker, Christopher E. Soulard, William Acevedo, Glenn E. Griffith, Rachel R. Sleeter, Roger F. Auch, Kristi Sayler, Stephen Prisley, Zhi-Liang Zhu
Role of remote sensing for land-use and land-cover change modeling
As the impacts of land-use and land-cover (LULC) change on carbon dynamics, climate change, hydrology, and biodiversity have been recognized, modeling of this transformational force has become increasingly important. Given the wide variety of applications that rely on the availability of LULC projections, modeling approaches have originated from a variety of disciplines, including geography, lands
Authors
Terry L. Sohl, Benjamin M Sleeter
Evaluation of the relation between evapotranspiration and normalized difference vegetation index for downscaling the simplified surface energy balance model
The Simplified Surface Energy Balance (SSEB) model uses satellite imagery to estimate actual evapotranspiration (ETa) at 1-kilometer resolution. SSEB ETa is useful for estimating irrigation water use; however, resolution limitations restrict its use to regional scale applications. The U.S. Geological Survey investigated the downscaling potential of SSEB ETa from 1 kilometer to 250 meters by correl
Authors
Jonathan V. Haynes, Gabriel B. Senay