Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium

The Multi-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.

Direct Product Partners

Bureau of Land Management

LANDFIRE

National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

United States Forest Service

United States Geological Survey

Supporting Partners

National Park Service

United States Department of Agriculture

United States Environmental Protection Agency

United States Fish and Wildlife Service

NLCD 2021 Now Available

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.

With the latest release, NLCD now includes map products characterizing land cover and land cover change across nine epochs from 2001 to 2021 (2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021). The 2021 suite of NLCD products follow the same protocols and procedures of the previously released NLCD epochs (2001-2019), are directly comparable to the 2019 release across the full time series, and are suitable for multi-temporal analysis. Science products and the change index, however, will need to be reacquired for the additional 2021 change information.

Specific map products include:

Land cover – Conterminous U.S. land cover at a 30-meter spatial resolution with a 16-class legend based on a modified Anderson Level II classification system
Land cover change index – Provides a simple and comprehensive way to visualize change that occurred across all the NLCD epochs of land cover
Urban imperviousness – Indicates urban impervious surfaces as a percentage of developed surface over every 30-meter pixel in the Conterminous U.S.
Urban impervious descriptor – Classifies specific types of roads, wind tower sites, building locations, and energy production sites to allow a deeper analysis of developed features
NLCD Science Products
1. Land Cover Change Disturbance Date – Identifies the first land cover classification change event between any two adjacent target years across all NLCD epochs at the 30-meter pixel level
1. Forest Disturbance Date – Identifies the most recent year of forest disturbance between the years 1984–2021
1. Land Cover Change Count – Calculates an integer count total of any change recorded between two consecutive epochs
1. Land Cover with additional Forest Transition Classes – Delineates spectrally stable grass and shrub areas from those that are transitional forest classes, which tend to be represented by forest harvest, burns, regrowth, and other disturbances
1. U.S. Forest Service Science Tree Canopy Cover – The original, unmasked Tree Cover Canopy data produced by the U.S. Forest Service, an MRLC partner

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)

NLCD 2021 will mark the last installment in traditional NLCD land cover mapping methodologies. Land cover data users can look forward to USGS’s premier land cover programs—NLCD and Land Cover Monitoring Assessment and Projection (LCMAP)—advancing the science of the National Land Cover Database. Research is well underway to produce the next generation of USGS land cover products with moderate thematic detail at low latency and annual frequency. These products will provide USGS with leading-edge capabilities for land cover monitoring, assessments, and projections. 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) across the conterminous United States at 30-meter spatial resolution and on an annual time step for the years 1985-2023.

Be sure to sign up for the USGS’s land cover listserv to stay up to date with our next generation land cover activities and receive other land cover community-relevant news.

Release of CONUS NLCD 2021 Tree Canopy Cover (TCC) data

The USDA Forest Service, in collaboration with the MRLC consortium, is pleased to announce the release of the CONUS NLCD 2021 Tree Canopy Cover (TCC) data. With this release, the NLCD TCC data are available at the same interval as the NLCD land cover data starting in 2011 (2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021). The data are now produced within a time-series framework, so change is now inherent in the annual time steps. There is a minimum mapping magnitude of +- 10% canopy cover for each cell between the annual time steps. These data supplant previous releases.  These tree canopy products have values representing the percentage of canopy cover for each 30 m pixel in the conterminous U.S.

Accompanying the new NLCD TCC products, is a Science TCC dataset. The Science TCC dataset is a derivative of the NLCD TCC production, and still maintains an annual time step (2008-2021). An additional highlight of these Science products is that they now contain information on both model-based uncertainty and pixel-wise model standard error. These TCC data are offered as a supplement to the NLCD TCC and users should beware that they have not been cartographically cleaned or filtered in any way.

Similar NLCD TCC and Science TCC data sets for coastal Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and American Virgin Islands will be available in the summer of 2023.

The USGS is excited to announce the development of the next generation of land cover and change products.

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.

Anderson Level II Land Cover over Atlanta, GA

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.

Be sure to sign up for the listserv to stay up to date with USGS’s next generation land cover activities and receive other relevant land cover news.

CEC Releases New Digital Land Cover/Land Use Map of North America, Most Accurate Available at This Scale

Montreal, 20 March 2023 — The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) is pleased to release the latest trinational digital land cover map of North America, under the North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS), a collaboration with the Governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States and their respective mapping agencies. This land cover map is the most accurate map available at this scale and is publicly available through the North American Environmental Atlas.

NALCMS 2022

“We at the CEC are proud of this new digital map, comprising approximately 24 billion pixels, and depicting land cover across North America for the year 2020 at a 30-meter spatial resolution. It is derived from USGS’s Landsat satellite imagery and cross-checked with ground observations for accuracy, making it the most accurate land cover map at the North American scale,” said Dominique Croteau, CEC Project Lead for Geospatial and Environmental Information.

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.

“People can appreciate that land cover information is necessary for a large range of applications related to environmental decision-making, natural resource management, adaptation to climate impacts, emergency response, environmental conservation and restoration and many more. Our goal with the North American land cover product is to support policy- and decision-makers, researchers, international and intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, land managers, among many others, from local to global, by allowing them to better understand the dynamics and patterns of North America’s land cover and to conduct both regional and local-level analyses,” concluded Croteau.

Download