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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: 2442

Priority questions in multidisciplinary drought research

Addressing timely and relevant questions across a multitude of spatio-temporal scales, state-of-the-art interdisciplinary drought research will likely increase in importance under projected climate change. Given the complexity of the various direct and indirect causes and consequences of a drier world, scientific tasks need to be coordinated efficiently. Drought-related research endeavors ranging
Authors
Miroslav Trnka, Michael Hayes, František Jurečka, Lenka Bartošová, Martha Anderson, Rudolf Brázdil, Jesslyn F. Brown, Jesus J. Camarero, Pavel Cudlín, Petr Dobrovolný, Josef Eitzinger, Song Feng, Taryn Finnessey, Gregor Gregorič, Petr Havlik, Christopher Hain, Ian Holman, David Johnson, Kurt Christian Kersebaum, Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, Jürg Luterbacher, Fabio Micale, Claudia Hartl-Meier, Martin Možný, Pavol Nejedlik, Jørgen Eivind Olesen, Margarita Ruiz-Ramos, Reimund P. Rötter, Gabriel Senay, Sergio M. Vicente-Serrano, Mark Svoboda, Andreja Susnik, Tsegaye Tadesse, Adam Vizina, Brian D. Wardlow, Zdeněk Žalud, Ulf Büntgen

Accuracy assessment of NLCD 2011 impervious cover data for the Chesapeake Bay region, USA

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) contains three eras (2001, 2006, 2011) of percentage urban impervious cover (%IC) at the native pixel size (30 m-x-30 m) of the Landsat Thematic Mapper satellite. These data are potentially valuable to environmental managers and stakeholders because of the utility of %IC as an indicator of watershed and aquatic condition, but lack an accuracy assessment bec
Authors
James Wickham, Nate Herold, Stephen V. Stehman, Collin Homer, George Z. Xian, Peter Claggett

Landsat Collections

In 2016, the U.S. Geological Survey reorganized the Landsat archive into a tiered collection structure, which ensures that Landsat Level-1 products provide a consistent archive of known data quality to support time-series analyses and data “stacking” while controlling continuous improvement of the archive and access to all data as they are acquired. Landsat Collection 1 required the reprocessing o
Authors

Assessing recovery and change in West Africa's rainfall regime from a 161-year record

The Sahel region is known for the multi-decadal occurrence of severe drought that commenced in the late 1960s. A still open question is whether or not the region's rainfall has returned to “normal.” This paper provides a compelling answer to that question by examining the longest and most comprehensive gauge series for the region ever published. It extends from 1854 to 2014 and is based on 602 gau
Authors
Sharon E. Nicholson, Andreas H. Fink, Chris Funk

Farmer-managed restoration of agroforestry parklands in Niger

Land rehabilitation enables sustainable intensification of agriculture and more resilient food production systems. Despite severe development challenges, Niger is the site of successful, farmer-managed efforts to counteract the global trend in land degradation that was supported by policy change. The vast majority of Niger’s land is located in the Sahara. Following a series of severe droughts duri
Authors
Melinda Smale, G. Gray Tappan, Chris Reij

Past role and future outlook of the Conservation Reserve Program for supporting honey bees in the Great Plains

Human dependence on insect pollinators continues to grow even as pollinators face global declines. The Northern Great Plains (NGP), a region often referred to as America’s last honey bee (Apis mellifera) refuge, has undergone rapid land-cover change due to cropland expansion and weakened land conservation programs. We conducted a trend analysis and estimated conversion rates of Conservation Reserv
Authors
Clint R.V. Otto, Haochi Zheng, Alisa L. Gallant, Rich Iovanna, Benjamin L. Carlson, Matthew Smart, Skip Hyberg

Quantifying variance across spatial scales as part of fire regime classifications

The emergence of large‐scale fire classifications and products informed by remote sensing data has enabled opportunities to include variability or heterogeneity as part of modern fire regime classifications. Currently, basic fire metrics such as mean fire return intervals are calculated without considering spatial variance in a management context. Fire return intervals are also only applicable at
Authors
Scholtz Rheinhardt, Samuel D. Fuhlendorf, Sherry A. Leis, Joshua J. Picotte, Dirac Twidwell

Distinguishing Southern Africa precipitation response by strength of El Niño events and implications for decision-making

December–February precipitation in southern Africa during recent El Niño events is studied by distinguishing circulation and precipitation responses during strong and moderate-to-weak events. We find that while both strong and moderate-to-weak El Niño events tend to dry southern Africa, the pattern and magnitude of precipitation anomalies in the region are different, with strong El Niño events res
Authors
Catherine Pomposi, Chris Funk, Shraddhanaand Shukla, Tamuka Magadzire

Coastal National Elevation Database

The Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) Applications Project develops enhanced topographic (land elevation) and bathymetric (water depth) datasets that serve as valuable resources for coastal hazards research (Danielson and others, 2016; Thatcher and others, 2016). These datasets are used widely for mapping inundation zones from riverine flood events, hurricanes, and sea-level rise and for
Authors
Jeffrey J. Danielson, Sandra K. Poppenga, Dean J. Tyler, Monica Palaseanu-Lovejoy, Dean B. Gesch

Rapid crop cover mapping for the conterminous United States

Timely crop cover maps with sufficient resolution are important components to various environmental planning and research applications. Through the modification and use of a previously developed crop classification model (CCM), which was originally developed to generate historical annual crop cover maps, we hypothesized that such crop cover maps could be generated rapidly during the growing season
Authors
Devendra Dahal, Bruce K. Wylie, Daniel Howard

National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data Archive

The National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data Archive is managed on behalf of the Secretary of the Interior by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observation and Science Center. The Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992 (51 U.S.C. §601) directed the U.S. Department of the Interior to establish a permanent global archive consisting of imagery over land areas obtained from satellites or
Authors
John Faundeen, Ryan Longhenry

Mapping cropland waterway buffers for switchgrass development in the eastern Great Plains, USA

Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum L.), a highly productive perennial grass, has been recommended as one potential source for cellulosic biofuel feedstocks. Previous studies indicate that planting perennial grasses (e.g., switchgrass) in high‐topographic‐relief cropland waterway buffers can improve local environmental conditions and sustainability. The main advantages of this land management practice i
Authors
Yingxin Gu, Bruce K. Wylie