RCMAP Long-term and Near-real time Rangeland Vegetation Monitoring – Tuesday, Sep 22, 2026, at 12:00pm CDT

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The USGS EROS User Services team is pleased to announce the upcoming “RCMAP Long-term and Near-real time Rangeland Vegetation Monitoring” webinar!

Join us for the USGS EROS User Experience Webinar Series, where we talk to staff at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center to learn more about the data, tools, and services available from EROS.

What to Expect:

During this webinar you will learn about the Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment and Projection (RCMAP) data, see case studies on how the data can support decision making, and how to access the products.

Rangeland managers need information about current vegetation conditions and how landscapes have changed over time. To address this need, scientists from the USGS and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) developed RCMAP.

RCMAP provides annual maps of fractional cover for Western U.S. rangelands and the sagebrush biome of Canada, expressed as a percentage from 0-100 for ten components: the cover of annual herbaceous, bare ground, herbaceous, litter, non-sagebrush shrub, perennial herbaceous, sagebrush, shrub, and tree, as well as shrub height. Maps are produced using Landsat imagery for each year in a time-series stretching from 1985-current.

This long-term record helps users understand how vegetation responds to drought, invasive species, land management decisions, and disturbance. RCMAP time-series data can also be used to evaluate the effects of weather variability, vegetation treatments and changes in management practices.

RCMAP also produces a suite of weekly temporal resolution exotic annual grass (EAG) and herbaceous cover products that support near-real-time empowering fire and grazing management decisions. The RCMAP-EAG products map the extent of EAG invasion helping managers evaluate treatment success and protect core, uninvaded habitats.

We will close the webinar with a question-and-answer session for anything related to RCMAP data, or the tools used to access, process, and download the data.

Our guest speaker will be Matthew Rigge, Ecologist for the USGS.

Webinar Details

Date: Tuesday, Sep 22, 2026

Time: 12:00 pm CDT (UTC/GMT-5)

Duration: 1 hour

Register Now

Please register to attend the “ RCMAP Long-term and Near-real time Rangeland Vegetation Monitoring” webinar. After registering, please either click “Add to Calendar” on the confirmation page or check your email, and possibly your spam folder, for a follow up email from Teams to ensure the webinar is saved to your calendar.

Feel free to forward this invite to your colleagues. For questions, contact the USGS EROS User Services team at custserv@usgs.gov.

This webinar will be recorded and will be available on the EROS User Experience Webinars webpage at a later date.

If you would like to sign up for the EROS User Group (EUG) listserv to be notified of all future EROS webinars, please email custserv@usgs.gov.