Publications

The primary goal of U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Natural Hazards Response is to ensure that the disaster response community has access to timely, accurate, and relevant geospatial products, imagery, and services during and after an emergency event. To accomplish this goal, products and services provided by the National Geospatial Program (NGP) and Land Remote Sensing (LRS) Program serve as a geos

Remote sensing information has been widely used to monitor vegetation condition and variations in a variety of ecosystems, including shrublands. Careful application of remotely sensed imagery can provide additional spatially explicit, continuous, and extensive data on the composition and condition of shrubland ecosystems. Historically, the most widely available remote sensing information has been

Gross primary production (GPP) and ecosystem respiration (Re) are the fundamental environmental characteristics that promote carbon exchanges with the atmosphere (Chapin and others, 2009), although other exchanges of carbon, such as direct oxidation (Lovett and others, 2006), can modify net ecosystem production (NEP). The accumulation of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems results in systems in which

Preface U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Professional Paper 1794–A is the first in a four-volume series on the status and trends of the Nation’s land use and land cover, providing an assessment of the rates and causes of land-use and land-cover change in the Western United States between 1973 and 2000. Volumes B, C, and D provide similar analyses for the Great Plains, the Midwest–South Central United

Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) emissions are important, but poorly quantified, components of riverine carbon (C) budgets. This is largely because the data needed for gas flux calculations are sparse and are spatially and temporally variable. Additionally, the importance of C gas emissions relative to lateral C exports is not well known because gaseous and aqueous fluxes are not commonly me

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 .

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

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

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

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

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

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