Synopsis
The paper reviews the major scientific and programmatic impacts of the Landsat program over its 50-year history. Landsat has made unique contributions in areas like agricultural crop mapping, monitoring climate change impacts, ecosystem monitoring, and mapping the human footprint on the land.
Some key points:
- With over 767,000 publications mentioning Landsat, it has had a greater scientific impact than any other Earth observation satellite program. Usage greatly increased after 2008 when the USGS adopted a free and open data policy.
- Early Landsat data enabled pioneering large-scale crop inventory experiments like LACIE and AgRISTARS. More recently, Landsat supports key agricultural monitoring efforts like the USDA Cropland Data Layer.
- The Landsat series provides an unparalleled record since 1972 to assess environmental changes related to climate change, like declines in snow cover, glacier retreat, changes in high latitude vegetation, and shifts in surface water extent.
- Landsat enables essential ecosystem monitoring capabilities related to land cover, forest change, habitat connectivity, and threats like fire and insect damage. This informs natural resource management and policy decisions.
- Mapping of the human footprint, urban expansion, and land use intensification has relied extensively on Landsat data as input. This helps monitor UN Sustainable Development Goals and progress in reducing habitat loss.
- Advances like Landsat data collections, analysis-ready data products, data access through cloud platforms like Google Earth Engine, and fusion with Sentinel-2 have vastly expanded Landsat use. This is reflected in the development of monitoring systems like the OpenET platform.
