Monitoring Surface Mines

Southern West Virginia is home to mountaintop removal mining, which began mostly in the 1990s. The Landsat Program’s nearly 50-year record of Earth surface imagery makes it an unparalleled resource for monitoring mine growth, movement, and reclamation. Scientists have used Landsat to track changes to surface mining activity since the 1970s. Today, commercial cloud platforms can be used to scan more than three decades of imagery for mining activity. One study determined that mining had disturbed 1,120 square miles of land area in central Appalachia between 1985 and 2015 (Pericak and others, 2018).

Tracking Forest Change

More than 75 percent of West Virginia is forested. The State’s forests face threats from wildfire, drought, disease, and invasive species. Landsat is used by projects like the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) to map tree cover and land cover. The maps help land managers understand changes to forests over time. Landsat imagery also enables the study of specific forest management questions in places like the Monongahela National Forest. In 2019, researchers used Landsat imagery and topographic information to track the effect on trees from mining and logging, and the extent and pace of their recovery (Dialesandro and others, 2019).

Managing Aquatic Ecosystems

West Virginia’s fisheries are important cultural and economic resources. Landsat imagery can be folded into research that improves the understanding of the landscape and how disturbances to it might affect aquatic ecosystems. Landsat’s Operational Land Imager (OLI) can see bands of light beyond those visible to the human eye, such as the near infrared and shortwave infrared bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. OLI can help capture photosynthetic activity such as algal blooms in lakes and rivers. Landsat data are among the water-quality monitoring sources listed in the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission’s (ORSANCO’s) Harmful Algal Bloom Monitoring and Response Communication Plan (ORSANCO, 2021).

Landsat—Critical Information Infrastructure for the Nation

Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing data source within Federal civilian agencies. Local, State, Tribal, and Federal agencies use Landsat to monitor and forecast a wide range of land surface phenomena. Information from Landsat contributes to day-to-day decisions on land, water, and resource use that protect life and property; safeguard the environment; advance science, technology, and education; support climate resiliency; and grow the U.S. economy. Landsat’s imagery provides a landscape-level view of land surface, inland lake, and coastal processes, both natural and human-induced. Landsat enables us to better understand the scope, nature, and speed of change to the natural and built environment.

Businesses draw upon Landsat data to provide customer-specific applications to improve logistics, resource allocation, and investment decisions. Commercial space imaging firms leverage Landsat data to refine product offerings and support new information services. A 2017 USGS study determined the total annual economic benefit of Landsat data in the United States. to be $2.06 billion, far surpassing its development and operating costs (Straub and others, 2019).

Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 provide 8-day repeat coverage of the Earth’s land surfaces. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the USGS are currently reviewing the findings from a joint Architecture Study Team, which will inform the design and implementation approach for Landsat Next, the follow-on mission to Landsat 9. Landsat 9 and its successors are planned to provide a sustainable, space-based system to extend the 50-year Landsat series of high-quality global land imaging measurements—the world’s longest time series of the Earth’s land surface.

The long-term availability of consistent and accurate Landsat data, combined with a no-cost data policy, allows users to analyze extensive geographic areas and better understand and manage long-term trends in land surface change. New cloud computing and data analytics technologies use Landsat data in a wide range of decision-support tools for Government and industry. Much like global positioning systems and weather data, Landsat data are used every day to help us better understand our dynamic planet.