Publications
Here you will find publications, reports and articles produced by Core Science System scientists. For a comprehensive listing of all USGS publications please click the button below.
Filter Total Items: 284
Crisis crowdsourcing framework: designing strategic configurations of crowdsourcing for the emergency management domain
Crowdsourcing is not a new practice but it is a concept that has gained significant attention during recent disasters. Drawing from previous work in the crisis informatics, disaster sociology, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) literature, the paper first explains recent conceptualizations of crowdsourcing and how crowdsourcing is a way of leveraging disaster convergence. The...
Authors
Sophia Liu
Specification for the U.S. Geological Survey Historical Topographic Map Collection
This document provides the detailed requirements for producing, archiving, and disseminating a comprehensive digital collection of topographic maps for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Historical Topographic Map Collection (HTMC). The HTMC is a digital archive of about 190,000 printed topographic maps published by the USGS from the inception of the topographic mapping program in 1884...
Authors
Gregory J. Allord, Jennifer L. Walter, Kristin A. Fishburn, Gale A. Shea
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium: 20 years of development and integration of USA national land cover data
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium demonstrates the national benefits of USA Federal collaboration. Starting in the mid-1990s as a small group with the straightforward goal of compiling a comprehensive national Landsat dataset that could be used to meet agencies’ needs, MRLC has grown into a group of 10 USA Federal Agencies that coordinate the production of five...
Authors
James D. Wickham, Collin Homer, James Vogelmann, Alexa McKerrow, Rick Mueller, Nate Herold, John Coluston
The southern megalopolis: using the past to predict the future of urban sprawl in the Southeast U.S.
The future health of ecosystems is arguably as dependent on urban sprawl as it is on human-caused climatic warming. Urban sprawl strongly impacts the urban ecosystems it creates and the natural and agro-ecosystems that it displaces and fragments. Here, we project urban sprawl changes for the next 50 years for the fast-growing Southeast U.S. Previous studies have focused on modeling...
Authors
Adam Terando, Jennifer K. Costanza, Curtis Belyea, Robert R. Dunn, Alexa McKerrow, Jaime A. Collazo
Baseline and projected future carbon storage and greenhouse-gas fluxes in ecosystems of the eastern United States
This assessment was conducted to fulfill the requirements of section 712 of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and to conduct a comprehensive national assessment of storage and flux (flow) of carbon and the fluxes of other greenhouse gases in ecosystems of the Eastern United States. These carbon and greenhouse gas variables were examined for major terrestrial ecosystems...
An ontology design pattern for surface water features
Surface water is a primary concept of human experience but concepts are captured in cultures and languages in many different ways. Still, many commonalities exist due to the physical basis of many of the properties and categories. An abstract ontology of surface water features based only on those physical properties of landscape features has the best potential for serving as a...
Authors
Gaurav Sinha, David Mark, Dave Kolas, Dalia E. Varanka, Boleslo E. Romero, Chen-Chieh Feng, E. Lynn Usery, Joshua Liebermann, Alexandre Sorokine
Generalisation operators
This chapter summarises cartographic generalisation operators used to generalise geospatial data. It includes a review of recent approaches that have been tested or implemented to generalise networks, points, or groups. Emphasis is placed on recent advances that permit additional flexibility to tailor generalisation processing in particular geographic contexts, and to permit more...
Authors
Larry V. Stanislawski, Barbara P. Buttenfield, Pia Bereuter, Sandro Savino, Cynthia A. Brewer
Integrating recent land cover mapping efforts to update the National Gap Analysis Program's species habitat map
Over the past decade, great progress has been made to develop national extent land cover mapping products to address natural resource issues. One of the core products of the GAP Program is range-wide species distribution models for nearly 2000 terrestrial vertebrate species in the U.S. We rely on deductive modeling of habitat affinities using these products to create models of habitat...
Authors
Alexa McKerrow, A. Davidson, Todd Earnhardt, Abigail L. Benson
Standard for the U.S. Geological Survey Historical Topographic Map Collection
This document defines the digital map product of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Historical Topographic Map Collection (HTMC). The HTMC is a digital archive of about 190,000 printed topographic quadrangle maps published by the USGS from the inception of the topographic mapping program in 1884 until the last paper topographic map using lithographic printing technology was published in...
Authors
Gregory J. Allord, Kristin A. Fishburn, Jennifer L. Walter
A new map of global ecological land units — An ecophysiographic stratification approach
In response to the need and an intergovernmental commission for a high resolution and data-derived global ecosystem map, land surface elements of global ecological pattern were characterized in an ecophysiographic stratification of the planet. The stratification produced 3,923 terrestrial ecological land units (ELUs) at a base resolution of 250 meters. The ELUs were derived from data on...
Authors
Roger Sayre, Jack Dangermond, Charlie Frye, Randy Vaughan, Peter Aniello, Sean P. Breyer, Douglas Cribbs, Dabney Hopkins, Richard Nauman, William Derrenbacher, Dawn J. Wright, Clint Brown, Charles Convis, Jonathan H. Smith, Laurence Benson, D. Paco VanSistine, Harumi Warner, Jill Janene Cress, Jeffrey J. Danielson, Sharon L. Hamann, Thomas Cecere, Ashwan D. Reddy, Devon Burton, Andrea Grosse, Diane True, Marc J. Metzger, Jens Hartmann, Nils Moosdorf, Hans H. Durr, Marc Paganini, Pierre Defourny, Olivier Arino, Simone Maynard, Mark Theodore Anderson, Patrick J. Comer
An applied ontology for semantics associated with surface water land cover
No abstract available.
Authors
Dalia E. Varanka, E. Lynn Usery
Developing an outcome-based biodiversity metric in support of the field to market project: Final report
Our objective was to create a metric that would calculate the relative impact of common commercial agricultural practices on terrestrial vertebrate richness. We sought to define impacts in fields (including field borders) of the southeastern region’s commercial production of corn, wheat, soy, and cotton. The metric is intended to serve as an educational tool, allowing producers to see...
Authors
C. Ashton Drew, Louise B. Alexander-Vaughn, Jaime A. Collazo, Alexa McKerrow, John P. Anderson