The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides nationwide data on land cover and land cover change at a 30m resolution with a 16-class legend based on a modified Anderson Level II classification system. The database is designed to provide cyclical updates of United States land cover and associated changes.

What is the National Land Cover Database?

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides nationwide data on land cover and land cover change at a 30m resolution with a 16-class legend based on a modified Anderson Level II classification system. The database is designed to provide cyclical updates of United States land cover and associated changes.

Where can I get land cover data?

Data are available on the MRLC website, either as prepackaged products or custom product areas can be interactively chosen using the MRLC viewer. NLCD 2019 offers land cover for years 2001, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, as well as impervious surface and impervious descriptor layers for each epoch.

Who produces national land cover data?

the U.S. Geological Survey
NLCD products are created by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium, a partnership of Federal agencies led by the U.S. Geological Survey. All NLCD data products are available for download at no charge to the public from the MRLC Web site: https://www.mrlc.gov/.

What is the Mrlc?

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.

How do I open NLCD data?

To open the nlcd data in qGIS, go to “Layer” in the top menu and click “Add Raster Layer”. Browse to where you saved the nlcd folder and click on the only file in there (a tif file). When it opens, it should like something like the image below. Pretty!

What is land use data?

The Land Use and Land Cover data collection includes global and regional data sets related to the forms of land and the uses of that land, whether natural or influenced by humans. Several of the data sets provide indices of the threat of potential development for setting conservation priorities.

What percentage of land cover is found on Earth?

Visualizing Countries by share of Earth’s surface There are over 510 million square kilometers of area on the surface of Earth, but less than 30% of this is covered by land. The rest is water, in the form of vast oceans.