US Landscapes

NASA

A Shift in What’s Shaping U.S. Landscapes

The land is always changing, sometimes by human hands: cities are built, farms expanded, and forests logged. Other changes lie mostly outside people’s control: wildfires burn through communities, and hurricanes reshape coastlines. For most of the past four decades, observations from the Landsat satellite record show that humans have dominated changes to the U.S. landscape. Recent research revealed a shift…