Kristen R. Marra

Media Satellites can capture all this growth in a snapshot. The Annual National Land Cover Database (NLCD), based on Landsat satellite data, takes an even closer look at growth in a variety of ways that are useful to land and resource managers, city planners and businesses. Developed land, as defined by the current Annual NLCD Collection 1.1, is land that has an impervious surface that doesn’t allow water through, such as concrete or asphalt, metal and all kinds of human-made structures.

The USGS has completed an oil and gas estimate for the Bakken and Three Forks Formations in the Williston Basin of Montana and North Dakota. The estimate includes 4.3 billion barrels of unconventional oil and 4.9 trillion cubic feet of unconventional natural gas in the two formations. This assessment updates the 2013 USGS assessment of the Williston Basin.

First posted December 6, 2018 Using a geology-based assessment methodology, the U.S. Geological Survey assessed undiscovered, technically recoverable continuous mean resources of 46.3 billion barrels of oil and 281 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Wolfcamp shale and Bone Spring Formation of the Delaware Basin in the Permian Basin Province, southeast New Mexico and west Texas.