NLCD Imperviousness (CONUS) All Years | Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with several federal agencies, has developed and released five National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products over the past two decades: NLCD 1992, 2001, 2006, 2011 and 2016. These products provide spatially explicit and reliable information on the Nation’s land cover and land cover change. To continue the legacy of NLCD and further establish a long-term monitoring capability for the Nation’s land resources, the USGS designed a new generation of NLCD products released in 2016. This design continues in 2019 and aims to provide innovative, consistent, and robust methodologies for production of a multi-temporal land cover and land cover change database from 2001 to 2019 at 2–3-year intervals. Comprehensive research was conducted and resulted in processes in streamlined processes for integrating specialized MRLC partner data along with numerous newly available dataset, assembling and preprocessing Landsat imagery and geospatial ancillary datasets; a multi-source integrated training data development and machine learning based land cover classifications; a temporally, spectrally, and spatially integrated land cover change analysis strategy; a hierarchical theme-based post-classification and integration protocol for generating land cover and change products; a continuous fields biophysical parameters modeling method; and an automated operational system for the NLCD 2019 production. These processes resulted in a five percent increase in accuracy from the 2011 product for an overall Level II & I Overall accuracy (OA) 86.4% & 90.6% in the NLCD 2016 release. (Wickham et. al, “Thematic Accuracy assessment of the NLCD 2016 land cover for the conterminous United States”, Remote Sensing of Environment, volume 257, May 2021, 112357 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112357 )

Legend

References

Download

Urban Imperviousness

Urban Imperviousness Data

RCMAP 1985-2023 Fractional Component Time-Series Now Available

Published Jan 19, 2024

The RCMAP product suite includes 10 components: annual herbaceous, bare ground, herbaceous, litter, non-sagebrush shrub, perennial herbaceous, sagebrush, shrub, tree, and shrub height. Data characterize the percentage of each 30-meter pixel in the Western United States covered by each component for each year from 1985-2023 - providing change information for 39 years. Because of file size limitations, individual years of component cover data are packaged in three time intervals including 1985-1996, 1997-2008, and 2009-2023. Perennial herb and non-sagebrush shrub are derivatives of herbaceous and annual herbaceous cover, and shrub and sagebrush cover, respectively.

View Products

NLCD 2021 Now Available

Published Jul 20, 2023

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in association with the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium, is pleased to announce the completion and release of the latest epoch of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) for the conterminous U.S.—NLCD 2021. The MRLC, a consortium 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, have been providing the scientific community with detailed land cover products for more than 30 years. Over that time, NLCD has been one of the most widely used geospatial datasets in the U.S., serving as a basis for understanding the Nation’s landscapes in thousands of studies and applications, trusted by scientists, land managers, students, city planners, and many more as a definitive source of U.S. land cover.

View Products

Enhanced Visualization and Analysis (EVA) Tool Now Available

Published Mar 25, 2021

The MRLC Consortium, in collaboration with NOAA and the USGS, is pleased to release version 2 of the Enhanced Visualization and Analysis (EVA) tool. This tool provides users with detailed county statistics for any two NLCD landcover dates to support quick and powerful change analyses. This tool was originally developed by NOAA and shared through the consortium with custom adaptations for NLCD.

Open EVA