Due to a lapse in appropriations, the majority of USGS websites may not be up to date and may not reflect current conditions. Websites displaying real-time data, such as Earthquake and Water and information needed for public health and safety will be updated with limited support. Additionally, USGS will not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted. For more information, please see www.doi.gov/shutdown
Core Science Systems
Publications
Here you will find publications, reports and articles produced by Core Science System scientists. For a comprehensive listing of all USGS publications please click the button below.
Automated road breaching to enhance extraction of natural drainage networks from elevation models through deep learning
High-resolution (HR) digital elevation models (DEMs), such as those at resolutions of 1 and 3 meters, have increasingly become more widely available, along with lidar point cloud data. In a natural environment, a detailed surface water drainage network can be extracted from a HR DEM using flow-direction and flow-accumulation modeling. However,...
Stanislawski, Larry; Brockmeyer, Tyler; Shavers, Ethan J. Area-preserving simplification of polygon features
Developing simplified representations of a two-dimensional polyline is an important problem in cartographic data analytics where datasets must be integrated across spatial resolutions. This problem is generally referred to as line simplification, and is increasingly driven by preservation of specific analytic properties such as positional accuracy...
Kronenfeld, Barry J.; Stanislawski, Larry V.; Brockmeyer, Tyler; Buttenfield, Barbara P. Similarity assessment of linear hydrographic features using high performance computing
This work discusses a current open source implementation of a line similarity assessment workflow to compare elevation-derived drainage lines with the high-resolution National Hydrography Dataset (NHD) surface-water flow network. The process identifies matching and mismatching lines in each dataset to help focus subsequent validation procedures to...
Stanislawski, Larry V.; Wendel, Jeffrey; Shavers, Ethan J.; Li, Ting Classifying physiographic regimes on terrain and hydrologic factors for adaptive generalization of stream networks
Automated generalization software must accommodate multi-scale representations of hydrographic networks across a variety of geographic landscapes, because scale-related hydrography differences are known to vary in different physical conditions. While generalization algorithms have been tailored to specific regions and landscape conditions by...
Stanislawski, Larry V.; Finn, Michael P.; Buttenfield, Barbara P.
A comparison of synthetic flowpaths derived from light detection and ranging topobathymetric data and National Hydrography Dataset High Resolution Flowlines
Bathymetric and topobathymetric light detection and ranging (lidar) digital elevation models created for the Delaware River were provided to the National Geospatial Program and used to evaluate synthetic flowpath extraction from bathymetric/topobathymetric lidar survey data as a data source for improving the density, distribution, and connectivity...
Miller-Corbett, Cynthia Generalizing linear stream features to preserve sinuosity for analysis and display: A pilot study in multi-scale data science
Cartographic generalization can impact geometric properties of geospatial data and subsequent analyses. This study evaluates simplification methods with the goal of preserving geometric details, such as sinuosity. We evaluate two recently developed line simplification algorithms that introduce Steiner points: Raposo’s Spatial Means, and Kronenfeld...
Stanislawski, Larry V.; Kronenfeld, Barry J.; Buttenfield, Barbara P.; Brockmeyer, Tyler (Contractor) Modeling and simulation of emergent behavior in transportation infrastructure restoration
The objective of this chapter is to create a methodology to model the emergent behavior during a disruption in the transportation system and that calculates economic losses due to such a disruption, and to understand how an extreme event affects the road transportation network. The chapter discusses a system dynamics approach which is used to...
Ojha, Akhilesh; Corns, Steven; Shoberg, Thomas G.; Qin, Ruwen; Long, Suzanna K. An open source high-performance solution to extract surface water drainage networks from diverse terrain conditions
This paper describes a workflow for automating the extraction of elevation-derived stream lines using open source tools with parallel computing support and testing the effectiveness of procedures in various terrain conditions within the conterminous United States. Drainage networks are extracted from the US Geological Survey 1/3 arc-second 3D...
Stanislawski, Larry V.; Survila, Kornelijus; Wendel, Jeffrey; Liu, Yan; Buttenfield, Barbara P.
A linked GeoData map for enabling information access
OverviewThe Geospatial Semantic Web (GSW) is an emerging technology that uses the Internet for more effective knowledge engineering and information extraction. Among the aims of the GSW are to structure the semantic specifications of data to reduce ambiguity and to link those data more efficiently. The data are stored as triples, the basic data...
Powell, Logan J.; Varanka, Dalia E. Partial polygon pruning of hydrographic features in automated generalization
This paper demonstrates a working method to automatically detect and prune portions of waterbody polygons to support creation of a multi-scale hydrographic database. Water features are known to be sensitive to scale change; and thus multiple representations are required to maintain visual and geographic logic at smaller scales. Partial pruning of...
Stum, Alexander K. ; Buttenfield, Barbara P.; Stanislawski, Larry V.
The National Map seamless digital elevation model specifications
This specification documents the requirements and standards used to produce the seamless elevation layers for The National Map of the United States. Seamless elevation data are available for the conterminous United States, Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. territories, in three different resolutions—1/3-arc-second, 1-arc-second, and 2-arc-second. These...
Archuleta, Christy-Ann M.; Constance, Eric W.; Arundel, Samantha T.; Lowe, Amanda J.; Mantey, Kimberly S.; Phillips, Lori A.
Elevation Difference and Bouguer Anomaly Analysis Tool (EDBAAT) User's Guide
This report describes a software tool that imports gravity anomaly point data from the Gravity Database of the United States (GDUS) of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and University of Texas at El Paso along with elevation data from The National Map (TNM) of the U.S. Geological Survey that lie within a user-specified geographic area of...
Smittle, Aaron M.; Shoberg, Thomas G.