Datasets

Description:

The 2015 North American Land Cover 30-meter dataset was produced as part of the North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS), a trilateral effort between Natural Resources Canada, the United States Geological Survey, and three Mexican organizations including the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia), National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of the Biodiversity (Comision Nacional Para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad), and the National Forestry Commission of Mexico (Comision Nacional Forestal). The collaboration is facilitated by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, an international organization created by the Canada, Mexico, and United States governments under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation to promote environmental collaboration between the three countries.
The general objective of NALCMS is to devise, through collective effort, a harmonized multi-scale land cover monitoring approach which ensures high accuracy and consistency in monitoring land cover changes at the North American scale and which meets each country’s specific requirements.
This 30-meter dataset of North American Land Cover reflects land cover information for 2015 from Mexico and Canada and 2016 for the United States. Each country developed its own classification method to identify Land Cover classes and then provided an input layer to produce a continental Land Cover map across North America. Canada, Mexico, and the United States developed their own 30-meter land cover products; see specific sections on data generation in the metadta.
The main inputs for image classification were 30-meter Landsat 4-8 Collection 1 Level 2 data in the Canada and United States Maps (including Alaska) and 5-meters RapidEye for Mexico land cover map. Image selection processes and reduction to specific spectral bands varied among the countries due to study-site-specific requirements. While Canada selected most images from the year 2015 with a few from 2014 and 2016, the United States employed mainly images from 2016 with few images from 2015 and 2017. Mexico used all available 5-meters RapidEye images from January to December 2015, orthorectified as individual 25 by 25 kilometers tiles and then resampled to 30-meters pixel size.
In order to generate a seamless and consistent land cover map of North America, national maps were generated for Canada by the CCRS; for Mexico by CONABIO, INEGI, and CONAFOR; and for the United States by the USGS. Each country chose their own approaches, ancillary data, and land cover mapping methodologies to create national datasets. This North America dataset was produced by combining the national land cover datasets. The integration of the three national products merged four Land Cover map sections, Alaska, Conterminous United States and Mexico.
In this second version of the North America Land Cover map, the Alaska section has been updated from the map released in February 2020 (version 1). The United States Geological Survey (USGS) provided an updated land cover map of Alaska in July 2020, which was consequently integrated in the continental map and replaced the first version.

Citation:

Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), 2020, 2015 Land Cover of North America at 30 Meters. North American Land Change Monitoring System, Canada Centre for Remote Sensing (CCRS), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Comision Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad (CONABIO), Comision Nacional Forestal (CONAFOR), Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia (INEGI) Edition 2.0, Raster digital data [30-m], accessed [YYYY-MM-DD], http://www.cec.org/north-american-environmental-atlas/land-cover-30m-2015-landsat-and-rapideye/

Additional Information: