Rhode Island and Landsat: Watching the Ocean State From Space

Rhode Island is the smallest state, but it is surrounded by heavily urbanized stretches of the East Coast and draws visitors from New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey for its wildlife and scenery. It holds New England's largest estuary, the 147-square-mile Narragansett Bay, where people dig clams, watch shorebirds and boat to its 30 islands. As a coastal state, it is affected by changing sea levels and ocean temperatures, and its agencies work to protect forests — covering more than half the state — from invaders such as the spongy moth (Lymantria dispar). The USGS Landsat Program, with more than 50 years of repeated observations from space, offers free data for studying these changes.

Coastal change

Rhode Island's long coastline makes it especially vulnerable to rising seas. NOAA's Coastal Change Analysis Program uses Landsat-derived land cover to catalog U.S. coastal landscapes every three years. Researchers also used the Landsat archive to build an algorithm for tracking tidal wetlands across northern New England and found that vegetated coastal wetlands in the region, Rhode Island included, shrank by about 2.6 square kilometers a year from 1986 to 2020.

A rock jetty at Bailey's Beach, Newport, Rhode Island. Photograph by Vanessa Baez, U.S. Geological Survey.

Forests

Landsat's two satellites image every land surface on Earth every 8 days, including wavelengths that reveal plant health invisible to the eye. Using Landsat images from 2015 to 2017, one study found that Rhode Island was the state hardest hit by a large spongy moth outbreak.

Spongy moth damage in New England. A fungus from Japan (Entomophaga maimaiga) had kept the moths fairly low since the late 1980s, but unusually dry Mays and Junes in 2014, 2015 and 2016 weakened it, and in 2016 caterpillars attacked the Northeast's hardwood forests in New England's worst outbreak in more than 30 years. U.S. Geological Survey.

Water quality

Water supplies are usually monitored sample by sample. Landsat offers a wider view:

• A study using Landsat 8 tracked harmful cyanobacteria in nine drinking-water reservoirs near Newport and found the satellite measurements accurately described algal bloom activity.
• A Brown University study used 582 Landsat scenes from 1982 through 2021 to measure thermal pollution — warm water — from the Brayton Point Power Station in Narragansett Bay, and documented the bay's surface cooling after the plant stopped discharging in 2011.

Landsat and the nation

The USGS National Land Imaging Program provides satellite imagery and other remotely sensed 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 most widely used land remote sensing source in federal civilian agencies, informing decisions about land, water and resources; businesses and commercial imaging firms build services on it. A 2024 study put Landsat's total annual economic benefit at $25.6 billion, far above its cost. NASA and the USGS are working toward the 2031 launch of Landsat 10 to extend the world's longest record of Earth's land surface, and the data remain free.

Sources

• U.S. Geological Survey: "Rhode Island and Landsat," Fact Sheet, citing Yang and others (2022), Pasquarella and others (2018), Keith and others (2018), Benoit and Fox-Kemper (2021) and Loomis and others (2024).