How Landsat Helps Kentucky: Wildfires, Algal Blooms, Forests and Parks

Kentucky runs from rolling pastures to forested Appalachian peaks. The Mississippi and Ohio rivers border much of it, hundreds of lakes lie within it, and it holds Mammoth Cave, the world's longest known cave system — along with long traditions of coal mining, farming, horse racing and bourbon making. Seen from space, through Landsat satellite imagery, the state reveals still more about the health of its land and water.

Wildfire effects

Landsat data map wildfire perimeters nationwide. Kentucky has spring and fall fire seasons, with hundreds of fires a year. The 1,600-acre Fish Trap Fire of 2010 in Daniel Boone National Forest let the U.S. Forest Service and university researchers study how wildfires, compared with prescribed burns, affect an Appalachian forest's recovery over time — including whether non-native species move in. Landsat supplied the pre-fire vegetation data and a burn-severity map.

Toxic algal blooms

Cyanobacteria can produce harmful algal blooms (HABs) that make lakes used for recreation and drinking water dangerous. With so many lakes, sampling them all is impractical, so the Kentucky Division of Water uses Landsat to spot blooms across wide areas, and models built on the imagery predict when and where they're likely. A suspected bloom is checked on the ground and may lead to a public advisory.

A harmful algal bloom. Photo by Jennifer L. Graham, U.S. Geological Survey

A NASA DEVELOP team also used Landsat vegetation data to help assess flooding and landslide risk for Covington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, which face each other across the Ohio River.

Parks and forests

• At Cumberland Gap National Historical Park, Landsat helped distinguish land-cover types, show where land has changed, and identify potential wildlife habitat.
• Models using Landsat helped the Forest Service estimate how much carbon is stored in Daniel Boone National Forest.

Landsat for the nation

• The most widely used land remote-sensing data among federal civilian agencies, and relied on by local, state and tribal governments too, for decisions on land, water and resources.
• A 2024 study put Landsat's annual economic benefit at $25.6 billion — far more than it costs.
• Landsat 8 and 9 image Earth's land every 8 days. Landsat 10, with major improvements, is planned for launch in 2031, extending a record of more than 50 years — the longest of Earth's land surface.
• The data are free, distributed worldwide through the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center under the National Land Imaging Program.

Sources

Based on "Kentucky and Landsat," U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3017, U.S. Geological Survey; a work of the United States government in the public domain.