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Agriculture covers 87 percent of Kansas's land, and it makes the state one of the country's top producers of wheat, grain sorghum and cattle. But the state at the geographic center of the conterminous United States holds far more than fields and pastures:
| Where | What |
|---|---|
| The east | spreading deciduous woodlands |
| The Flint Hills, east-central | the country's only extensive remaining stand of tallgrass prairie, with more than 500 plant species — many of them wildflowers, among them the sunflower that gave the Sunflower State its nickname |
| Near the center | Cheyenne Bottoms, at 41,000 acres the largest marsh in the interior United States, where migrating birds arrive by the thousands each spring and fall — the endangered whooping crane (Grus americana) among them |
| To the south | the inland saltwater marshes of Quivira National Wildlife Refuge, drawing many more |
| The west | chalk outcrops such as Castle Rock and Monument Rocks, fossil-bearing remains of a sea floor from millions of years ago |
| Statewide | oil and natural gas fields — and, since two University of Kansas professors found helium in a sample from a gas well in 1905, a substantial helium supply |
The Landsat satellites give Kansas tools for watching over and managing these lands. Here is how.
Crops and land cover
Landsat's scale and long archive make it very good at seeing vegetation change.
- The Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program of the Kansas Biological Survey — set up by NASA and the State of Kansas — made statewide Land Cover Patterns maps from Landsat for 1990, 2005 and 2015, to study how the landscape changes.
- Watching crop production has been a goal for agriculture since the first Landsat launch. Landsat underpins the U.S. Department of Agriculture's yearly Cropland Data Layer (CDL), which shows which crops are planted, where and how widely across the country — basic information about the food supply and land use.
- The CDL was used to study the first year of industrial hemp in Kansas. 60 percent of hemp fields had replaced pasture or other undeveloped, uncultivated land, so the amount of cultivated land grew overall.
Water for irrigation
Irrigation accounts for an average of 85 percent of the water Kansas consumes. Water from the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer, which lies under parts of Kansas and seven other states, has supported farming in western Kansas for generations. But groundwater is falling faster than the aquifer can recharge, raising doubts about how long it will last.
Landsat helps track and manage that use. Its thermal data help model how much water irrigation uses by measuring evapotranspiration — water moving into the air by evaporation and by plants' transpiration. USGS EROS Center scientists used it to map water use and the overall water balance of Kansas croplands, both irrigated and rain-fed.
Center-pivot irrigation (red circles) around Garden City, southwestern Kansas, on August 16, 1972 (left) and August 26, 2021 (right). The water comes from the High Plains aquifer. Landsat false-color images, U.S. Geological Survey
Redcedar in the oak woods
Eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) is native and useful for windbreaks, but fire suppression has let it thrive and spread where it once did not grow — grasslands and deciduous forests. It can transform habitats, displace birds and wildlife, and, being highly flammable, raise the risk of wildfire.
Kansas State University researchers used Landsat's continuous record and spectral bands to measure how far redcedar spread into Kansas's oak-dominated forests from 1986 to 2017. Looking in the season when the deciduous trees were dormant, they found substantial encroachment over time in all three study areas — a result that could help land managers and landowners target treatment and lower wildfire risk.
Landsat for the nation
The USGS National Land Imaging Program supplies satellite imagery and other remote sensing and geospatial data to government, business, universities and the public, with worldwide access to Landsat through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, which the program funds.
- Landsat is the most widely used land remote sensing source among federal civilian agencies. Local, state, Tribal and federal agencies use it to monitor and forecast what happens on the land surface — informing everyday decisions on land, water and resources that protect life and property, safeguard the environment, advance science and education, support climate resilience and grow the economy.
- Businesses build customer-specific applications on it for logistics, resource allocation and investment; commercial imaging firms use it to refine products and start new services.
- A 2017 USGS study put Landsat's total annual economic benefit in the United States at $2.06 billion, far above what it costs to build and run.
- Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 together cover Earth's land every 8 days. NASA and the USGS are reviewing a joint Architecture Study Team's findings to shape Landsat Next, the mission after Landsat 9, so that the 50-year Landsat record — the world's longest time series of Earth's land surface — continues.
- Consistent, accurate data offered at no cost let users study wide areas and long-term trends, and cloud computing now puts Landsat into decision tools across government and industry — used every day, like global positioning systems and weather data.
Sources
Based on Kansas and Landsat, U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3057, USGS Publications Warehouse, citing the Kansas Department of Agriculture (2016), Peterson and Egbert (2017), Ebert and others (2020), Ji and others (2021), Pabodha Galgamuwa and others (2020) and Straub and others (2019); a work of the United States government in the public domain.
Licenza: CC0 1.0 (pubblico dominio) · Tratto da pubs.usgs.gov
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