Month: April 2014

Two Washington D.C.-based events this month helped introduce Landsat to the public. On April 21 and 22, at an Earth Day celebration in D.C.’s Union Station, visitors explored changes to Earth’s landscapes over time. Using cubes displaying four different Landsat scenes, participants puzzled out the sequence of large landscape changes in Brazil’s tropical forests, the Mount St. Helens region pre- and post-eruption, Yellowstone National Park before and after the widespread 1988 fires, and Las Vegas over the last four decades of extensive urban growth.

Landsat satellites have monitored Earth’s environment for more than four decades, providing detailed imagery of some of our planet’s most precious ecosystems such as forests, coastlines, glaciers, volcanoes and oceans. Scientists, researchers, foresters, emergency responders and educators use the data sets to understand natural and human-caused surface changes, identify the ecological impact of natural disasters, examine the effectiveness of environmental policies, and help preserve our planet for future generations.

Launched on April 15, 1999, the Landsat 7 satellite has now been observing Earth from outer space for 15 years. The Landsat program is a decades-long NASA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) partnership that has provided a continuous, unbiased record of change across the earth land surface since 1972.

Just released, the latest edition of the nation’s most comprehensive look at land-surface conditions from coast to coast shows the extent of land cover types from forests to urban areas. The National Land Cover Database (NLCD 2011) is made available to the public by the U.S. Geological Survey and partners.

On April 1, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) hosted an event to present to the research and industrial community the interim results and assessments from NASA’s Sustainable Land Imaging (SLI) Architecture Study.

What happens to the Mallard Duck population when prairie potholes disappear?