
Does a Bear Smile in the Woods? Citizen Scientists and Satellites Find Out
NASA satellites are helping Wisconsin develop a clearer picture of its diverse and abundant fauna.

Satellite-based Program to More Accurately Identify Land Cover
A new program uses Landsat satellite data to automatically categorize what’s on the ground more accurately than other land cover products.

Open Digital Mapping For Assessing Carbon Storage in Tropical Peatlands
Tropical peatland can be mapped accurately using freely-available remote sensing data and open source software.

Thousands of Citizen-Scientists Help Researchers Map Kelp Forests
Kelp forests are beautiful but fragile habitats for a wide array of plant and animal species.

Global Mangrove Mapping with Landsat
The area of mangrove wetlands around the world has been declining over recent decades.

Floating Forests: Citizen Scientists are Mapping Giant Kelp with Landsat
Learn more about the huge citizen science kelp mapping endeavor called Floating Forests.

What Lies Beneath: Mapping Benthic Habitats with Landsat
A method for mapping coral reefs or other benthic habitats over time.

How Much Swamp Are We Talking Here?
Towards Better Mapping of Coastal Wetlands
Ways to better estimate the greenhouse gas contributions of wetlands.

Graphing a Path to Survival: Habitat Connectivity in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin
Quantifying the impact of historic land-use and hydroclimatic variability on landscape connectivity dynamics across Australia’s breadbasket.

Researchers Explore Causes of Land Cover Change in African Savannas
This study examined Landsat satellite data from the past 30 years to track broad land cover change in the Chobe district of Northern Botswana.

Finding Baltimore’s Mosquito Hotspots with Help from Landsat
High levels of residential abandonment and unchecked vegetation growth in low-income neighborhoods are strong indicators of mosquito prevalence. Higher income neighborhoods are also susceptible to mosquito-borne disease due to the presence of […]

Oyster Prospecting with Landsat 8
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Maine have demonstrated that Landsat 8 satellite data can be used to find locations where oysters farms should thrive.

Blazing Fast Relief: A NASA-Supported Tool is Accelerating Wildfire Recovery
Burned Area Emergency Response teams—one of most important parts of wildfires that you’ve probably never heard of.

At the Bottom of the World, Satellites Are Guiding Commerce and Conservation
MAPPPD is the first free, open-access Antarctic decision support system that integrates remotely sensed inputs, such as Landsat 7 images and MODIS sea ice data, to provide an assessment of Adélie and other penguin species across the frozen continent.

Welcome to the Intertidal Zone:
Mapping Australia’s Coast with Landsat
Using 28 years of Landsat data, an Australian research team has created a continent-wide intertidal zone extent map for the whole of the Australian coast.

Landsat Reveals Bird Habitat Loss in California
Drought and reduced seasonal flooding of wetlands and farm fields threaten a globally important stopover site for tens of thousands of migratory shorebirds in California’s Sacramento Valley, a new Duke University-led study shows.

How Satellite Data Changed Chimpanzee Conservation Efforts
Approximately 345,000 or fewer chimpanzees remain in the wild, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, a substantial decline from the more than two million that existed a hundred years ago.

Where the Wetlands Are
Documenting and protecting wetlands has become crucial to the eight states and two Canadian provinces thronging the Great Lakes.

Apalachicola’s Disappearing Swamp
The hardwood swamp along the Apalachicola River is slowly replaced by bottomland hardwood forest.

Tracking Water Resources in California’s Central Valley
A near real-time water resources tracking and decision-support system for the Central Valley of California.

What Satellites Can Tell Us About How Animals Will Fare in a Changing Climate
From the Arctic to the Mojave Desert, terrestrial and marine habitats are quickly changing. Satellites are particularly well-suited to observe habitat transformation and help scientists forecast what animals might do next.

How Louisiana’s Coastal Marshes are Responding to Climate Change
Louisiana’s coastal marshes are responding to climate change.

The Poleward March of Mangroves
Mangrove expansion has been observed in some subtropical locations around the world.

Landsat Reveals Serious Decline in Georgia Salt Marsh Health
Scientists at the University of Georgia’s Marine Institute at Sapelo Island have found that the amount of vegetation along the Georgia coast has declined significantly in the last 30 years, spurring concerns about the overall health of marshland […]

Landsat—The Watchman that Never Sleeps
In western North America, mountain pine beetles infest and ravage thousands of acres of forest lands. Landsat satellites bear witness to the onslaught in a way that neither humans nor most other satellites can.

Thirsting for Equitable Water Distribution, Australia Turns to Landsat
Since record keeping began in 1860, no period has been drier for southeastern Australia than the decade-long Millennium Drought. The lack of rain between 1997 and 2009 led to livestock losses, crop failures, and percentage drops in the Australian GDP.

Landsat Data Show Rapid Recovery for Some Forests in Santa Cruz Mountains Despite Drought
NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey’s Landsat satellite images over the past three decades showed that the severe drought periods recorded since the 1980s have not slowed rapid tree and shrub growth, especially on steep slopes burned recently by […]

Landsat Helps Feed Tired And Hungry Birds
The BirdReturns program, created by The Nature Conservancy of California, is an effort to provide “pop-up habitats” for some of the millions of shorebirds, such as sandpipers and plovers, that migrate each year from their summer breeding grounds […]

Landsat Uncovers Underground Forest Fungi
A NASA-led team of scientists has developed the first-ever method for detecting the presence of different types of underground forest fungi from space, information that may help researchers predict how climate change will alter forest habitats.

New Technique Tracks ‘Heartbeat’ of Hundreds of Wetlands
Across the U.S. and particularly in Washington state, very little is known about the acreage, yearly flooding cycles and even the actual locations of wetlands. Even hazier is what could happen to these vital ecosystems under climate change.

A New Observation Method That Sees the Forest for the Trees
A marriage in the remote forests of China promises to unite two important forces to better inform the health and future of biodiversity. The union is reported in this week’s journal Ecological Indicators by Michigan State University researchers.

An Integrated Look at Barrier Islands: Assateague to Metompkin
A new Landsat-based report from the USGS St. Petersburg Coastal and Marine Science Center takes an integrated look at barrier islands.

How Hurricane Sandy Affected New Jersey Coastal Marshes
Alex Riter, a graduate student at the University of Maryland College Park, presented her finding on how Hurricane Sandy affected New Jersey coastal marches at #AGU15. We talked to Riter about her research.

Using Landsat to Measure Chlorophyll in the Chesapeake Bay
Sara Lubkin, previously with the NASA DEVELOP program, presented a poster at #AGU15 on her work using Landsat data in concert with MODIS data to measure chlorophyll levels in the Chesapeake Bay. We spoke with Lubkin about her work.

Forest Disturbances and their Causes in California
Courtney Reents, a graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, presented a poster on forest disturbance in California at #AGU15.

Climate Change, Conservation, and the Chemical Evolution of Prairie Potholes
Martin Goldhaber gave a talk about how climate change will impact the hydrochemistry of wetlands in an immensely important ecosystem known as the Prairie Pothole Region at #AGU15. Landsat data helped Goldhaber track how the size of the […]

Land Change Trends, Midwest–South Central U.S., 1973 to 2000
A new Landsat-based report on land use trends in the Midwest and South Central U.S. between 1973 and 2000 was released by USGS this month.

Recounting Recent Fire History of Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve
When you think of Southern Florida’s vast everglades, fire is not something that usually comes to mind, but the region has a long history of seasonal fires.

Landsat Images Advance Watershed Restoration in Western Tanzania
For those who live along its shores, Lake Tanganyika in east Africa is the backbone of local transportation and serves as an essential source of household water and protein. Every night, fishers lure nocturnal, sardine-like fish called dagaa […]

Landsat Helps Feed the Birds
The BirdReturns program, created by The Nature Conservancy of California, is an effort to provide “pop-up habitats” for some of the millions of shorebirds, such as sandpipers and plovers, that migrate each year from their summer breeding grounds […]

A Beautiful Menace: Tracking Water Hyacinth with Landsat
Delivering maps and tabular summaries of live water hyacinth coverage in waterways of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta from the latest cloud-free Landsat satellite imagery.

A Landsat-based Tool to Track Cheatgrass, Monitor Potential Wildfire Hazard
Landsat 8 imagery is being used to identify increased wildfire susceptibility due to the invasion of cheatgrass on rangelands.

Satellites Enable Coral Reef Science Leap from Darwin to Online
With Earth-observing satellite data, scientists can now monitor the health of coral reefs, even in the most remote regions scattered around the globe where it is otherwise difficult to see changes.

The Sound of Deforestation, A Hack to Make Data Sing
In his lightning talk Lagomasino proposed a challenge to help study deforestation by linking satellite imagery and ground-images gathered via crowdsourcing

Landsat Satellite Sees Green-up Along Colorado River’s Delta After Experimental Flow
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 […]

From the River to the Sea
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 […]

Unleashing Climate Data and Innovation for more Resilient Ecosystems
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 […]

Mapping South Asia’s Mangroves
Along the sea’s edge in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, the dense coastal population lives largely in symbiosis with the region’s mangrove forests.
Mangroves—a vast network of intertidal trees and shrubs with their characteristic […]

Dinosaur GPS
Dr. Robert Anemone is the head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. But he works out of a pretty standard office. The administrative assistant greets you in the outer office before gesturing toward […]

Modeling a Changing American Landscape
Land change is a signature activity of human civilization. Since the dawn of history, people have purposefully converted natural landscapes to human-dominated areas. Typical motivations for land change are cultivation (e.g. slash-and-burn […]