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Geospatial data were developed to characterize pre-fire biomass, burn severity, and biomass consumed for the Black Dragon Fire that burned in northern China in 1987. Pre-fire aboveground tree biomass (Mh/ha) raster data were derived by relating plot-level forest inventory data with pre-fire Landsat imagery from 1986 and 1987. Biomass data were generated for individual species: Dahurian larch (Larix gmelinii Rupr. Kuzen), white birch (Betula platyphylla Suk), aspen (Populus davidiana Dode and Populus suaveolens Fischer), and Mongolian Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica Litvinov). A raster layer of total aboveground tree biomass was also generated. Burned area was manually delineated using the normalized...
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Plot-level field data were collected in the summer of 2014 to estimate aboveground and belowground biomass in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and Dismal Swamp State Park in North Carolina and Virginia. Data were collected at 85 plots. The location of the center of each plot was recorded with a Trimble ProXH global positioning system (GPS) and differentially corrected. Data files included 1: GDS_plots.csv, 2. GDS_FWD.csv, 3. GDS_LWD.csv, 4. GDS_Shrubs.csv, 5. GDS_Trees.csv, and 6. GDS_plot_summaries.csv. The data contained in GDS_plot_summaries.csv were calculated from the GDS_plots.csv, GDS_FWD.csv, GDS_LWD.csv, GDS_Shrubs.csv, GDS_Trees.csv files using the R statistical software environment (R Core...
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Water provides society with economic benefits that increasingly involve tradeoffs, making accounting for water quality, quantity, and their corresponding economic productivity more relevant in our interconnected world. In the past, physical and economic data about water have been fragmented, but integration is becoming more widely adopted internationally through application of the System of Environmental-Economic Accounts for Water (SEEA-Water), which enables the tracking of linkages between water and the economy over time and across scales. In this paper, we present the first national and subnational SEEA-Water accounts for the United States. We compile accounts for: (1) physical supply and use of water, (2) water...
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The Upper Missouri River headwaters (UMH) basin (36 400 km2 ) depends on its river corridors to support irrigated agriculture and world-class trout fisheries. We evaluated trends (1984–2016) in riparian wetness, an indicator of the riparian condition, in peak irrigation months (June, July and August) for 158 km2 of riparian area across the basin using the Landsat normalized difference wetness index (NDWI). We found that 8 of the 19 riparian reaches across the basin showed a significant drying trend over this period, including all three basin outlet reaches along the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers. The influence of upstream climate was quantified using per reach random forest regressions. Much of the interannual...
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Stone rows, enclosures, structures and chambers can be found in the landscapes of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Structures similar to those shown in the cover photo are documented elsewhere. The age, cultural affiliation, and purpose of these stone structures--which are found in a variety of forms, such as piles arranged in spatial configurations across landscapes, shapes suggesting animal effigies, platforms and chambers--have been the subject of much debate. Some have argued they are remnants of colonial agricultural and storage practices; others that they are prehistoric Native American ceremonial structures. Ascertaining the time periods of their creation had previously been impossible. We felt that optically...
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Global trends in wetland degradation and loss have created an urgency to monitor wetland extent, as well as track the distribution and causes of wetland loss. Satellite imagery can be used to monitor wetlands over time, but few efforts have attempted to distinguish anthropogenic wetland loss from climate-driven variability in wetland extent. We present an approach to concurrently track land cover disturbance and inundation extent across the Mid-Atlantic region, United States, using the Landsat archive in Google Earth Engine. Disturbance was identified as a change in greenness, using a harmonic linear regression approach, or as a change in growing season brightness. Inundation extent was mapped using a modified version...
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The current state of permafrost in Alaska and meaningful expectations for its future evolution are informed by long-term perspectives on previous permafrost degradation. Thermokarst processes in permafrost landscapes often lead to widespread lake formation and the spatial and temporal evolution of thermokarst lake landscapes reflects the combined effects of climate, ground conditions, vegetation, and fire. This study provides detailed analyses of thermokarst lake sediments of Holocene age from the southern loess uplands of the Yukon Flats; including bathymetry and sediment core analyses across a water depth transect. The sediment core results, dated by radiocarbon and 210Pb, indicate the onset of finely laminated...
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Stabilizing the eastern, migratory population of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) is expected to require substantial habitat restoration on agricultural land in the core breeding area of the Upper Midwestern U.S. Previous research has considered the potential to utilize marginal land for this purpose because of its low productivity, erodible soils, and high nutrient input requirements. This strategy has strong potential for restoring milkweed (Asclepias spp.), but may be limited in terms of its ability to generate additional biophysical and socioeconomic benefits for local communities. Here we explore the possibility of restoring milkweed via the creation of continuous riparian buffer strips around perennial...
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Landscape carbon (C) flux estimates are necessary for assessing the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to buffer further increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Advances in remote sensing have allowed for coarse-scale estimates of gross primary productivity (GPP) (e.g., MODIS 17), yet efforts to assess spatial patterns in respiration lag behind those of GPP. Here, we demonstrate a method to predict growing season soil respiration at a regional scale in a forested ecosystem. We related field measurements (n=144) of growing season soil respiration across subalpine forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains ecoregion to a suite of biophysical predictors with a Random Forest model (30 m pixel size). We...
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Post-fire shifts in vegetation composition will have broad ecological impacts. However, information characterizing post-fire recovery patterns and their drivers are lacking over large spatial extents. In this analysis we used Landsat imagery collected when snow cover (SCS) was present, in combination with growing season (GS) imagery, to distinguish evergreen vegetation from deciduous vegetation. We sought to (1) characterize patterns in the rate of post-fire, dual season Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) across the region, (2) relate remotely sensed patterns to field-measured patterns of re-vegetation, and (3) identify seasonally-specific drivers of post-fire rates of NDVI recovery. Rates of post-fire...
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The dataset was generated to describe historical land-use and land-cover (LULC)for the northern Colorado urban Front Range (which includes the cities of Boulder, Fort Collins, Greeley, and Denver) for an area covering approximately 1,023,660 hectares. The Front Range urban landscape is diverse and interspersed with highly productive agriculture as well as natural land cover types including evergreen forest in the Rocky Mountain foothills and Great Plains grassland. To understand the dynamics of urban growth, raster maps were created at a 1-meter resolution for each of four time steps, nominally 1937, 1957, 1977, and 1997. In total, 8 to 38 LULC classes were identified using manual interpretation techniques, aerial...
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The dataset was generated for the South Central Plains EPA level III ecoregion which extends through eastern Texas, northwestern Louisiana, southwest Arkansas, and a small portion of southeastern Oklahoma covering approximately 15.2 ha. Contained in the data set are land change causes that occurred between 2001 to 2006 such as forest harvest, surficial mining, and cropland expansion. Only those pixels (30-meter resolution) that have changed during the time period have their cause classified, otherwise no change is indicated between 2001 and 2006. In general, the process to create the data combined an automated and manual interpretation approach of spatial data to correctly identify land change causes. In the approach,...
Starting in 2022, processing switched to the Collection 2 Landsat ARD data. Landsat Burned Area Products for 2022 based on Landsat Collection 2 data are available at: Hawbaker, T.J., Vanderhoof, M.K., Schimdt, G.L., and Picotte, J.P., 2023. The Landsat Collection 2 Burned Area Products for the conterminous United States, U.S. Geological Survey Data Release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P9F26LY6 The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed and implemented an algorithm that identifies burned areas in temporally-dense time series of Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) scenes to produce the Landsat Burned Area Products. The algorithm makes use of predictors derived from individual ARD Landsat scenes, lagged reference...
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This release provides data collected by the climate monitoring array of the U.S. Department of the Interior on Federal lands in Arctic Alaska over the period August 1998 to July 2019; this array is part of the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost (DOI/GTN-P). In addition to presenting data, this release also describes monitoring, data collection, and quality-control methods. The array of 16 monitoring stations spans lat 68.5°N. to 70.5°N. and long 142.5°W. to 161°W., an area of approximately 150,000 square kilometers. Data collection is ongoing and includes the following climate- and permafrost-related variables: air temperature, wind speed and direction, ground temperature, soil moisture, snow depth, rainfall...
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The CLIM-MET stations are meteorological/geological stations that are designed to function in remote areas for long periods of time without human intervention. These stations measure meteorological and wind-erosion parameters under varying climatic and land-use conditions to detect and describe ongoing landscape changes. Combined with historic and other data, CLIM-MET data can provide inputs into regional climatic models that describe how the Southwest will respond to future climatic conditions.
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This release contains avaialable particle-size and mineralogic data as well as latitude and longitude information for dust samples collected from snow at high elevation sites in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and from dust source areas on the Colorado Plateau.
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Complete and accurate burned area map data are needed to document spatial and temporal patterns of fires, to quantify their drivers, and to assess the impacts on human and natural systems. In this study, we developed the Landsat Burned Area (BA) algorithm, an update from the Landsat Burned Area Essential Climate Variable (BAECV) algorithm. We present the BA algorithm and products, changes relative to the BAECV algorithm and products, and updated validation metrics. We also present spatial and temporal patterns of burned area across the conterminous U.S. and a comparison with other burned area datasets. The BA algorithm identifies burned areas in analysis ready data (ARD) time-series of Landsat imagery from 1984...
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Although ecosystem service (ES) modeling has progressed rapidly in the last 10-15 years, comparative studies on data and model selection effects have become more common only recently. Such studies have drawn mixed conclusions about whether different data and model choices yield divergent results. In this study we apply inter- and intra-model comparisons to address these questions at national and provincial scales in Rwanda. We compare results of (1) carbon, annual, and seasonal water yield using InVEST and WASSI models, and the above plus the InVEST sediment regulation model using (2) 30- and 300 m resolution data and (3) three different input land cover datasets. For the inter-model comparison, we found the two...
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Plot-level field data were collected in the summer of 2014 to estimate aboveground and belowground biomass in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge and Dismal Swamp State Park in North Carolina and Virginia. Data were collected at 85 plots. The location of the center of each plot was recorded with a Trimble ProXH global positioning system (GPS) and differentially corrected. Data files included 1: GDS_plots.csv, 2. GDS_FWD.csv, 3. GDS_LWD.csv, 4. GDS_Shrubs.csv, 5. GDS_Trees.csv, and 6. GDS_plot_summaries.csv. The data contained in GDS_plot_summaries.csv were calculated from the GDS_plots.csv, GDS_FWD.csv, GDS_LWD.csv, GDS_Shrubs.csv, GDS_Trees.csv files using the R statistical software environment (R Core...
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Light-absorbing particles in atmospheric dust deposited on snow cover (dust-on-snow, DOS) diminish albedo and accelerate the timing and rate of snow melt. Identification of these particles and their effects are relevant to snow-radiation modeling and water-resource management. Laboratory-measured reflectance of DOS samples from the San Juan Mountains (USA) were compared with DOS mass loading, particle sizes, iron mineralogy, carbonaceous matter type and content, and chemical compositions. Samples were collected each spring for water years 2011-2016, when individual dust layers had merged into one (all layers merged) at the snow surface. Average reflectance values of the six samples were 0.2153 (sd, 0.0331) across...


map background search result map search result map Data Release for the validation of the USGS Landsat Burned Area Product across the conterminous U.S. (ver. 2.0, May 2020) Data release for the Understanding recurrent land use processes and long-term transitions in the dynamic south-central United States, c. 1800 to 2006 Climate Impact Meteorological Stations (CLIM-MET) Data from The Mojave National Preserve, California and Canyonlands National Park, Utah 1998-2016 Data Release for The sensitivity of ecosystem service models to choices of input data and spatial resolution (ver. 1.1, June 2020) Data Release associated with Data Series - DOI/GTN-P Climate and Active-Layer Data Acquired in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1998-2019 (ver. 3.0, March 2021) Data Release for Phosphorous speciation and solubility in aeolian dust deposited in the interior American West Data release for the Historical land use and land cover for assessing the northern Colorado Front Range urban landscape Data release for estimating soil respiration in a subalpine landscape using point, terrain, climate and greenness data Data Release for "Holocene thermokarst lake dynamics in northern Interior Alaska: the interplay of climate, fire, and subsurface hydrology" Data release for Influence of multi-decadal land use, irrigation practices and climate on riparian corridors across the Upper Missouri River headwaters basin, Montana Great Dismal Swamp field measurements for aboveground and belowground biomass Data release for Monarch Habitat as a Component of Multifunctional Landscape Restoration Using Continuous Riparian Buffers Great Dismal Swamp field measurements for aboveground and belowground biomass Data release for Integrating physical and economic data into experimental water accounts for the United States: lessons and opportunities Pre-fire biomass, burn severity, biomass consumption, and fire perimeter data for the 1987 Black Dragon Fire in China Data for Dust deposited on snow cover in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado, 2011-2016: Compositional variability bearing on snow-melt effects Data release for tracking rates of post-fire conifer regeneration distinct from deciduous vegetation recovery across the western U.S. Tracking disturbance and inundation to identify wetland loss Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) data and ages for selected Native American Sacred Ceremonial Stone Landscape features--Final Project Report Submitted to the Narragansett Tribal Historic Preservation Trust Data for Dust deposited on snow cover in the San Juan Mountains, Colorado, 2011-2016: Compositional variability bearing on snow-melt effects Great Dismal Swamp field measurements for aboveground and belowground biomass Great Dismal Swamp field measurements for aboveground and belowground biomass Data release for the Historical land use and land cover for assessing the northern Colorado Front Range urban landscape Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) data and ages for selected Native American Sacred Ceremonial Stone Landscape features--Final Project Report Submitted to the Narragansett Tribal Historic Preservation Trust Pre-fire biomass, burn severity, biomass consumption, and fire perimeter data for the 1987 Black Dragon Fire in China Data release for Influence of multi-decadal land use, irrigation practices and climate on riparian corridors across the Upper Missouri River headwaters basin, Montana Data Release for The sensitivity of ecosystem service models to choices of input data and spatial resolution (ver. 1.1, June 2020) Data Release for "Holocene thermokarst lake dynamics in northern Interior Alaska: the interplay of climate, fire, and subsurface hydrology" Climate Impact Meteorological Stations (CLIM-MET) Data from The Mojave National Preserve, California and Canyonlands National Park, Utah 1998-2016 Data release for the Understanding recurrent land use processes and long-term transitions in the dynamic south-central United States, c. 1800 to 2006 Data Release for Phosphorous speciation and solubility in aeolian dust deposited in the interior American West Data Release associated with Data Series - DOI/GTN-P Climate and Active-Layer Data Acquired in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1998-2019 (ver. 3.0, March 2021) Data release for estimating soil respiration in a subalpine landscape using point, terrain, climate and greenness data Tracking disturbance and inundation to identify wetland loss Data release for Monarch Habitat as a Component of Multifunctional Landscape Restoration Using Continuous Riparian Buffers Data release for tracking rates of post-fire conifer regeneration distinct from deciduous vegetation recovery across the western U.S. Data Release for the validation of the USGS Landsat Burned Area Product across the conterminous U.S. (ver. 2.0, May 2020) Data release for Integrating physical and economic data into experimental water accounts for the United States: lessons and opportunities