Pennsylvania and Landsat: Forests, Floods and Old Energy Sites From Space

Landsat satellites have watched Earth's land surface for more than 50 years, and in Pennsylvania their images feed decisions about forests, water and energy.

Watching over the forests

Pennsylvania's forests, public and private, offer recreation and habitat, and invasive insects are a serious concern for them. Landsat is valuable for assessing the damage: its satellites deliver new images every 8 days and see beyond visible light, revealing insect damage to the forest canopy. The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has worked with Rutgers University partners on mapping damage from the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid through the Landsat archive, and many studies of the spongy moth, in places such as the Allegheny National Forest, have drawn on Landsat data.

Turkeyfoot Overlook, where the Casselman and Youghiogheny Rivers meet just north of Confluence, Pennsylvania. Image from USGS's fact sheet.

Mapping the past, sketching the future

In the mid-1960s, drought pulled salty water from the Delaware River Estuary north through the Delaware River Basin's rivers and streams, to within 8 miles of Philadelphia's water supply — a stark reminder of the need for wise water management. Urban growth and land-use change have altered the basin, and rising seas make its water problems more urgent, along with saltwater intrusion, drought and stronger, more frequent storms. In 2021 researchers used Landsat and other data to "backcast" hundreds of years of land-cover change across the basin and to model several scenarios for the next 100 years — projections that can inform land management and resilience planning.

Landsat images of the Schuylkill River west of Philadelphia, where muddy water rose in several communities after Hurricane Ida's downpour. USGS.

Tracking the energy industry's changes

More than 160 years have passed since Edwin L. Drake drilled the nation's first commercially successful oil well in Titusville, and by 1859 Pennsylvania was already a leading producer and user of bituminous coal. The steel mills that spread across western Pennsylvania in the early 1900s gave Pittsburgh's NFL team its name, the Steelers. Fossil fuels and steel are no longer the state's biggest industries, but both still matter to its economy, and Landsat can be used to monitor the recovery of old mines and oil sites and to study the environmental effects of new energy development.

Landsat for the nation

The USGS National Land Imaging Program provides 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.

• Landsat is the land remote sensing data most widely used by federal civilian agencies, and local, state and Tribal agencies use it too, to monitor and forecast changes at the land surface.
• Its images inform everyday decisions about land, water and resources that protect life and property, safeguard the environment, advance science and education and grow the economy. Businesses use it for logistics, resource and investment decisions, and commercial imaging firms build on it.
• A 2024 study put Landsat's total annual economic benefit at $25.6 billion, far above its cost.
• Landsat 8 and 9 together cover Earth's land every 8 days, and NASA and USGS are working toward a 2031 launch of Landsat 10, extending the world's longest continuous record of Earth's land surface, now more than 50 years long.
• Its long, consistent record and free data let users study large areas and long-term trends, and cloud computing now builds Landsat into decision tools for government and industry. Like GPS and weather data, it is used every day to understand a changing planet.

Sources

Rewritten from the U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet 2022–3025, "Pennsylvania and Landsat" (public domain), in hubnx's own words. The fact sheet says Pennsylvania has 10 national forests and 20 state forests; those counts are not repeated here.