New Jersey and Landsat: Heat Islands, Pine Barrens Fires and Sandy's Marshes

New Jersey is one of the smallest states, but it holds a great deal: more than 9 million people, which makes it the most densely populated state, and landscapes that run from Atlantic barrier islands and beaches to the Appalachian Mountains, and from the forests of the Pine Barrens to swampland. The "Garden State" still keeps traces of its farming past in produce, horse and dairy farms and plant nurseries.

The third state to join the Union has loomed large in American history. More than 200 battles and skirmishes of the American Revolution were fought there, more than in any other state. Manufacturing, tourism and fishing have each shaped its industry, and today many residents commute to New York City, across the Hudson River to the northeast, or to Philadelphia, across the Delaware to the west.

A crowded state facing environmental change has a lot at stake, for people and for natural resources alike. Landsat, the satellite series run jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA, helps officials watch and plan for resilient cities and landscapes. A U.S. Geological Survey fact sheet gives three examples.

Finding the hottest blocks

Urban heat islands are parts of a city with more hard surfaces, such as buildings and pavement, and fewer natural ones. They run hotter than their surroundings and can contribute to heat-related illness and death.

Sustainable Jersey, a nonprofit that works with state agencies, other nonprofits, foundations, universities and industry to find best practices for a sustainable future — and certifies municipalities and schools that put them into practice — used Landsat 8 thermal imagery to build a heat island map of the state. It combines land surface temperatures with a tree canopy layer from the Landsat-based National Land Cover Database, so that towns can find their hot spots and cool them.

Lowering wildfire risk

The Pinelands Commission, a state agency, oversees the Pinelands National Reserve, which covers 22 percent of New Jersey. More people and more activity in the wildland-urban interface — where developed and undeveloped land meet — have raised the risk of damaging fires. A NASA DEVELOP Program project worked with the commission on a fire risk assessment tool and map, using Landsat 8 among other data, to find where in the interface future development would be most suitable.

Landsat is also the foundation of Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity (MTBS), a federal interagency program that maps the location, extent and severity of every large fire in the United States to guide fire management, risk assessment and resource decisions.

The extent and severity of the Spring Hill fire, which started on March 30, 2019, in the Pine Barrens, mapped by Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey and Forest Service.

Studying coastal marshes after Sandy

Hurricane Sandy came ashore near Atlantic City on October 29, 2012, and is New Jersey's most destructive natural disaster. It damaged 346,000 homes and eroded the entire coastline. The state Department of Environmental Protection found that places with coastal wetlands were better protected, suffering less physical and economic damage. University of Maryland researchers used Landsat data from 2000 to 2015 to study how Sandy affected the state's coastal marshes; their maps of variation in marsh vegetation could help identify areas at risk from future sea level rise and storms.

Landsat across the country

The USGS National Land Imaging Program supplies satellite imagery and other remotely sensed and geospatial data to government, business, universities and the public, who can reach the Landsat archive worldwide through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center.

Landsat is the most widely used source of land remote sensing data among federal civilian agencies, and local, state, tribal and federal agencies use it to monitor and forecast what happens on the land. Its information feeds everyday decisions on land, water and resources — protecting lives and property, safeguarding the environment, advancing science and education, and growing the economy. Businesses build customer applications on it for logistics, resource allocation and investment, and commercial imaging companies use it to refine their products. A 2024 study put the total annual economic benefit of Landsat data at $25.6 billion, far more than it costs to build and run.

Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 together image Earth's land surface every 8 days. NASA and the USGS are working towards a 2031 launch of Landsat 10, the next mission, with significant improvements, to carry on a record of more than 50 years — the world's longest of Earth's land surface. Because the data are consistent, accurate and free, users can study large areas and long-term change, and new cloud computing tools put Landsat into decision-support systems for government and industry. Like GPS and weather data, Landsat is used every day to understand a changing planet.

Sources

Based on "New Jersey and Landsat," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3054 (version 1.1, July 2026), published by the U.S. Geological Survey; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The fact sheet's heat island map belongs to Sustainable Jersey and was used by the USGS with permission; it is not reproduced here.
• Studies and sources the fact sheet cites: National Park Service (2017) on Revolutionary War battles; Sustainable Jersey (2022); NASA (2018) on the Pinelands project; MTBS (2021); Bilinski and others (2015) on Sandy's damage; Rangoonwala and others (2017) on marsh vegetation; Loomis and others (2024) on Landsat's economic value.