Land Use And Land Cover Pdf

[Lara Preece]

TheMulti-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium is a group of federal agencies who coordinate and generate consistent and relevant land cover information at the national scale for a wide variety of environmental, land management, and modeling applications. The creation of this consortium has resulted in the mapping of the lower 48 United States, Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico into a comprehensive land cover product termed, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), from decadal Landsat satellite imagery and other supplementary datasets.

MRLC hosts land cover and land condition data from various sources, including NLCD and Rangeland Condition Monitoring Assessment and Projection (RCMAP) time-series, Ecological Potential, and projections of future fractional rangeland components. Data are offered for download, as WMS services, and in applications.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with the MRLC consortium and Bureau of Land Management (BLM), is pleased to announce the availability of a new generation of Rangeland, Condition, Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (RCMAP) fractional component data spanning a 1985-2023 time-series. The RCMAP product suite consists of ten components: annual herbaceous, bare ground, herbaceous, litter, non-sagebrush shrub, perennial herbaceous, sagebrush, shrub, tree, and shrub height (new to this generation). Several enhancements were made to the RCMAP process relative to prior generations. First, we revised the high-resolution training using an improved neural-net classifier and modelling approach. These data serve as foundation to the RCMAP approach. We further improved our training database by incorporating additional datasets. Next, we improved our Landsat compositing approach to better capture the range of conditions from across each year and through time. These composites are based on Collection 2 Landsat data with improved geolocation accuracy and dynamic range.

NLCD products can be explored and/or downloaded from multiple outlets, based on your specific application. If you are a user looking for bulk download options of the entire suite of products, the website includes direct access to the source data and metadata. NLCD is also available in the MRLC NLCD Viewer web application, a dynamic platform for data visualization, side-by-side image analysis and comparisons, and a custom tool enabling users to select a region of interest for download. Local class by class analysis between years is also available at the MRLC EVA Tool (mrlc.gov)

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in collaboration with the Multi-resolution Landscape Consortium (MRLC), has provided the community with the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), a detailed land cover database for more than 30 years. To produce the next generation of USGS land cover, with moderate thematic detail at low latency and annual frequency, research is well underway for single stream land cover products. In the initial 2024 product release, users can expect Anderson Level II type land cover classes (for example, the 16 land cover categories used in the current NLCD classification typology) at 30-meter spatial resolution on an annual time step for the years 1985-2023 for the conterminous United States. Research is underway to improve the methodology for producing and validating land cover and change related components included in the next-generation product suite and follow-on products. The results will provide USGS with leading-edge capabilities for land cover monitoring, assessments, and projections.

In the coming months, USGS in collaboration with the MRLC, will publish a 2021 CONUS land cover suite (NLCD 2021). Later in 2023, we will release the Conterminous United States (CONUS) Reference Data product updated through 2021, followed by a validation assessment of the Collection 1.3 LCMAP CONUS Science Products. After Collection 1.3, no further production of LCMAP Science Products will occur.

Land cover refers to the classification of surface cover on the ground, whether forest, urban infrastructure, bodies of water or agricultural land, etc., helping to distinguish natural and anthropogenic features. Identifying, delineating, and mapping land cover (or land use) is important for global, regional and local monitoring studies, resource management and planning activities. Land cover classes can include natural features such as tropical forest, shrubland, grassland, and water bodies, but also human-made features such as urban areas and cropland.

This new land cover map, presented by the CEC, harmonizes land cover classification into 19 comparable classes across Canada, Mexico and the United States. The NALCMS land cover classes are based on the Land Cover Classification System (LCCS) standard developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

The Dynamic Land Cover product offers annual global land cover maps and cover fraction layers, providing a detailed view of land cover at three classification levels. It uses modern data analysis techniques to ensure temporal consistency and accuracy, with the latest version achieving 80% accuracy at class level 1 on each continent. The product also includes continuous field layers, or "fraction maps", that provide proportional estimates for vegetation and ground cover for the land cover types. These features make it a versatile tool for a wide range of applications, including forest monitoring, rangeland management, crop monitoring, biodiversity conservation, climate modelling, and urban planning.

The first Land Cover map, produced with algorithm V1.0, was provided in July 2017, derived from the Vegetation instrument on board of PROBA satellite (PROBA-V) 100 m time-series, a database of high quality land cover training sites and several ancillary datasets. This collection 1 was solely covering the African continent and the 2015 mapping year. For the global up-scaling of the product for the reference year 2015, the algorithm V2.0 was improved not only to map the entire globe, but also to improve the map quality, reaching now 80 % of accuracy at class level 1 on each continent, and its usability. Therefore, the production of the map has switched to the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system aligned to the Sentinel-2 tiling grid in order to improve mapping quality in the high latitudes. Moreover, the Sentinel-2 tiling grid facilitates continuation in the production as soon the primary data input has to switch from PROBA-V to Sentinel-2. Collection 2 was delivered in May 2019. Algorithm V3.0 added the change detection methodology. Particular emphasis was put on the temporal consistency of the annual land cover maps. Specific algorithms were applied to increase the stability of the annual classifications with the effect that differences between the annual maps resulting from inconsistent classifications are reduced while areas of probable land cover change are considered as different classes in the various annual maps.

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Land cover can be determined by analyzing satellite and aerial imagery. Land use cannot be determined from satellite imagery. Land cover maps provide information to help managers best understand the current landscape. To see change over time, land cover maps for several different years are needed. With this information, managers can evaluate past management decisions as well as gain insight into the possible effects of their current decisions before they are implemented.

Coastal managers use land cover data and maps to better understand the impacts of natural phenomena and human use of the landscape. Maps can help managers assess urban growth, model water quality issues, predict and assess impacts from floods and storm surges, track wetland losses and potential impacts from sea level rise, prioritize areas for conservation efforts, and compare land cover changes with effects in the environment or to connections in socioeconomic changes such as increasing population.

Land cover includes both developed and natural areas. All living things depend on their habitat, or land cover, for survival. They find shelter, food, and protection there. Land cover has a direct effect on the kinds of animals that will likely inhabit an area. Therefore, land cover is of great interest to ecologists, who study how plants and animals relate to their environment.

Understanding exactly how much land cover change influences floods is a question of scientific research. In general, land cover influences the way water flows across the land. When cement or even packed soil replaces a forest or wetland, water flows across the surface as run off instead of being absorbed. This change could alter the flow of rivers and/or trigger flash-flooding.

Land cover is a factor in making a slope prone to landslides. In particular, trees anchor soil, so a hill that has been cleared has a higher risk of slipping than one that has not. Bare ground, especially recently burned ground, is also more prone to erosion, which can lead to landslides.

Land cover plays a role in several aspects of the water cycle. Plants absorb water from the soil and transpire water vapor to the atmosphere. Solid surfaces like rock or paved areas allow water to run across the surface, while soil and plant-covered areas tend to absorb water. A change in land cover can change how much water is absorbed into the ground vs how much flows into rivers.

Different materials absorb sunlight and radiate heat in different ways. Materials used in cities or residential areas, such as cement, metal, and asphalt, radiate more heat than plant-based land cover. As a result, cities can be as much as 8 degrees warmer than suburban or natural landscapes, a phenomenon known as urban heat island. This image was made from Landsat-7 satellite observations. It shows Atlanta in photo-like natural color (top) and as a heat map. The cement-colored city is much warmer than the surrounding area. Urban heating is great enough to influence rainfall patterns.

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