How Landsat Serves Mississippi

This USGS fact sheet describes Landsat and its plans as they stood when it was written.

Landsat satellites have photographed the Earth's land surface for 50 years, the longest such record in the world, and the data are free. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) fact sheet on Mississippi describes how that record is used in the state.

Forest health

Landsat's long run of repeated images lets researchers follow forests over time. In 2013, scientists used it to measure how forest disturbances affected carbon stored in the forests of Mississippi and Alabama. Long-term trends in forest disturbance and tree cover are also captured in Landsat-based map layers from the interagency Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools program, the National Land Cover Database, and the USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection initiative.

The Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge is a mosaic of pine savannas and pinelands laced with wooded swamps and drainages, with a small tract of estuarine marsh. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Crops and catfish

Agriculture and forestry are among Mississippi's top industries. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2017 Census of Agriculture put the state's livestock and crop sales at $6.2 billion, with poultry the leading commodity. Landsat is a key input to USDA's Cropland Data Layer, which maps U.S. crop types every year at 30-meter resolution and gives an observation-based check on what producers report planting.

Landsat sensors also see beyond visible light, into the infrared and near-infrared. That lets researchers calculate field-by-field vegetation indexes, the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and the Enhanced Vegetation Index, both stand-ins for how green plants are. Those can underpin crop yield estimates across the state and guide decisions about fertilizer, irrigation and weed control.

Catfish aquaculture ponds, the blue rectangles, near Belzoni, Mississippi, in a false-color Landsat 9 image from February 2022. Landsat is useful for tracking land use across whole landscapes and monitoring crops through the growing season. U.S. Geological Survey.

Storm damage

Tornadoes threaten lives, property, cropland and natural resources in Mississippi, and hurricanes steadily threaten its Gulf Coast. Landsat images can track wide-scale damage from both, such as coastal erosion and inland flooding. Emergency managers use Landsat data from the USGS Hazards Data Distribution System to map disasters and assess damage during and right after them. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, that system has responded to dozens of hurricanes that threatened or struck the state.

Landsat nationally

• Access: the USGS National Land Imaging Program supplies satellite imagery and other remote sensing and geospatial data to government, business, universities and the public, and funds the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, which provides worldwide access to Landsat data.
• Use: Landsat is the most widely used source of land remote sensing data in federal civilian agencies. Local, state, tribal and federal agencies use it to monitor and forecast changes on the land, supporting decisions on land, water and resources, environmental protection, science and education, climate resilience and the economy.
• Business: companies build customer applications on Landsat data for logistics, resource allocation and investment, and commercial imaging firms use it to refine their products.
• Value: a 2017 USGS study put Landsat's total annual economic benefit to the United States at $2.06 billion, far more than it costs to build and run.
• Coverage: Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 together image the Earth's land every 8 days.
• What is next: NASA and the USGS were reviewing the findings of a joint Architecture Study Team to shape Landsat Next, the mission to follow Landsat 9 and carry on the record.

Sources

• U.S. Geological Survey, "Mississippi and Landsat," Fact Sheet 2022–3062. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/fs20223062/full
• The fact sheet cites Chen and others (2013) on forest carbon, Dickson (2021) on the Census of Agriculture, Wang and others (2019) on crop yields, and Straub and others (2019) on Landsat's economic value.