Landsat Images Provided to the International Charter in Dec. 2014
December 31, 2014
The International Charter is a system that supplies free satellite imagery to emergency responders anywhere in the world.
The International Charter is a system that supplies free satellite imagery to emergency responders anywhere in the world.
Mapbox is a cloud-based map platform startup that creates custom maps with open source tools. The team at Mapbox consists of over fifty cartographers, data analysts and software engineers, located in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California. One of the open-source tools used by Mapbox is Landsat imagery. The company has a satellite team consisting of five employees dedicated to projects that use Landsat imagery to develop new products and enhance existing imagery.
SilviaTerra is a four-year-old start-up company with five full-time employees that is contributing to the change in the way forests are managed in the United States. The company provides next-generation, highly accurate forest inventory data to fifteen users of various sizes. The customer base includes national and international timber companies. SilviaTerra is profitable and continues to grow.
Early iterations of geospatial technologies have been around for more than a century. The first remote sensing was from balloons in the mid-1800s, and aerial photography began in the 1930s. But the 1972 launch of Landsat 1, the first remote-sensing space satellite, followed by GPS satellites a few years later fueled the field’s spiraling growth.
Each year the U.S. Forest Service takes a census of trees, chronicling the nation’s forest heath and timber resources. Forest managers use this information to project what U.S. forests will be like in coming decades and, if needed, to adjust their forest management practices in order to safeguard sustainability.
A pulse of water released down the lower reaches of the Colorado River last spring resulted in more than a 40 percent increase in green vegetation where the water flowed, as seen by the Landsat 8 satellite. The March 2014 release of water – an experimental flow implemented under a U.S.-Mexico agreement called “Minute 319” – reversed a 13-year decline in the greenness along the delta.
With the launch of the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) in February 2013, the already unprecedented Landsat global record continues and could reach 50 years or longer in length. LDCM, renamed, Landsat 8 when the mission was declared operational in May 2013, is based on several technological advances that are providing more and higher quality multispectral data than previous Landsat missions. In addition, Landsat 8 includes new multispectral measurements that are expanding science and applications.
A pulse of water released down the lower reaches of the Colorado River last spring resulted in more than a 40 percent increase in green vegetation where the water flowed, as seen by the Landsat 8 satellite. The March 2014 release of water – an experimental flow implemented under a U.S.-Mexico agreement called “Minute 319” – reversed a 12-year decline in the greenness along the delta.
At this year’s AGU Fall meeting over 300 presentations will feature research work done with the use of Landsat data. The Landsat-related papers and posters run the gamut of disciplines from cryosphere to biogeoscience to hydrology to global environmental change to natural hazards to informatics!
The distribution of permafrost is generally poorly mapped at regional scales. This presents a problem for resource managers and modelers trying to understand the distribution and extent of permafrost susceptible to a warming climate. To better understand permafrost’s influence on high-latitude ecosystems, researchers are developing methods to map the presence of permafrost.
Ecosystems provide vast services and benefits to humankind: food and water that is needed for survival; nutrients and other natural products that fuel farms and industries; natural controls on many pests and pathogens; storage of carbon safely out of the atmosphere; shared spaces for tourism and recreation; and sanctuaries that preserve biodiversity, natural beauty, and cultural history.
LANDFIRE National used approximately 5,340 Landsat scenes to map CONUS, Alaska and Hawaii. Landfire continues to rely on Landsat imagery for updates. There were 13,185 scenes processed from 1984-2009 to capture landscape change for CONUS for the LANDFIRE 2008 update (representing change 1999-2008). Additional years are included because the algorithm used to identify change needed a longer time horizon.
