Title: National Land Cover Data Set (NLCD), 2019
Originator: Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium - USGS, EPA, NOAA, BLM, NASA, NPS, USDA-NASS, USFWS, US Army COE.
Consortium Lead: U.S. Geological Survey
Abstract:
From the NLCD home page:
“National Land Cover Database (NLCD) is the national land cover product created by
the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium. NLCD provides - for the first time - the capability to assess
wall-to-wall, spatially explicit, national land cover changes and trends across the United States. As with three
previous NLCD land cover products NLCD keeps the same 16-class land cover classification scheme that has been applied
consistently across the United States at a spatial resolution of 30 meters. NLCD is based primarily on a decision-tree
classification of Landsat satellite data.”
“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."
"The primary objective of the MRLC NLCD is to provide the Nation with nationally complete, current, consistent, and public domain information on the Nation's land cover. Land cover information is critical for local, state, and federal managers and officials to assist them with issues such as assessing ecosystem status and health, modeling nutrient and pesticide runoff, understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity, land use planning, deriving landscape pattern metrics, and developing land management policies."
"All MRLC NLCD data products are available at no charge to the user."
For a detailed definition and discussion on MRLC and the NLCD products, please refer to https://www.mrlc.gov.
The state data sets are provided by NRCS with a 300 meter buffer beyond the state border to facilitate combining the state files into larger regions.
For seamless CONUS rasters, provided in their native projection (Albers Conical Equal Area) for all editions, please click here. For Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico rasters in their native projections, please click here.
Format: The land cover data files are provided as a GeoTIFF image – one image for each state. The land cover data sets are single band raster images.
Spatial Reference Information: Universal Transverse Mercator, North American Datum 1983.
For states with multiple UTM zones, a predominant UTM zone was chosen for the NLCD state map.
