Land Cover

The USGS is collaborating with researchers from other agencies, academia, and industry to predict coastal impacts from hurricanes. The results from this study will better inform coastal morphological change models, which will lead to improved hurricane impact projections.

The Land Change Monitoring, Assessment and Projection (LCMAP) project has generated an integrated suite of annual land cover and land surface change products for the United States based on time series data from the Landsat record from 1985–2021. LCMAP Collection 1.3 Science Products are based on the USGS implementation of the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm.

The Land Change Monitoring, Assessment and Projection (LCMAP) project has generated an integrated suite of annual land cover and land surface change products for the United States based on time series data from the Landsat record from 1985–2020. LCMAP Collection 1.2 Science Products are based on the USGS implementation of the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm.

The desert outpost of Palm Springs, California and the surrounding Thousand Palms region has experienced explosive population growth over the past four decades, with tract after tract of development filling in previously barren landscapes along Interstate 10.

At first glance, the most striking patterns in land cover change over time in this animation of the Oso, Washington area would appear to be forest harvest and regrowth, but a more dramatic change emerged in 2014.

The man-made Florida playland of Walt Disney World has grown outward on all sides since the amusement park’s construction commenced in the 1960s. Much of that growth has overtaken the wetlands, tree cover and grassland/shrublands near Orlando.

The USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection initiative aims to identify where the landscape is changing and why.

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center produces near-real-time estimates of annual herbaceous land cover for the Great Basin, Snake River Plain, Wyoming, and contiguous areas in the United States. Estimates are based on enhanced Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (eMODIS) Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) data at 250-meter resolution.

The following provides a short synopsis of current and recently completely projects using USGS EROS’ FORE-SCE model, and where applicable, links to download data. Additional project information and data will be made available as our research progresses.

Land-use change and the resultant changes in land cover impact a wide variety of ecological processes. Projected land-cover data produced by EROS have been used for a wide variety of applications, including those listed in the left column. The following provides a partial list of published applications for modeled land-use and land-cover data.

Many factors determine how human beings modify the earth's landscape. Land-cover change is inherently a local event, yet broader scale socioeconomic and biophysical factors also affect how humans make decisions to use the landscape. Projecting future land cover requires modelers to account for driving forces of land-cover change operating at scales from local ("bottom-up") to global ("top-down")...

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum L.) is a winter annual grass that has invaded and altered the shrub steppe ecosystem in the Great Basin for about 100 years. This highly competitive grass invades recently disturbed areas and then outcompetes most native vegetation by using requisite resources like soil water and nutrients in early spring before other native plants. It also can alter its phenotype and...