Projected land use/land cover for 2050.
Spatial and temporal distributions of current and projected land-use and land-cover (LULC) changes are essential in modeling future potential carbon storage and fluxes within the nation's major ecological regions (Zhu and others, 2010). Annual raster-based maps of future LULC conditions for the years 2006 to 2100 were created based on historical LULC conditions combined with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (IPCC-SRES) scenario elements to develop four distinct, equally plausible outcomes. The historical LULC baseline conditions were derived from 1.) a modified version of the 1992 National Land Cover Dataset (http://www.epa.gov/mrlc/nlcd.html), 2.) calibration and modeling of the 1992 to 2000 LULC change estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey's Land Cover Trends project (http://landcovertrends.usgs.gov/), and 3.) change estimates for 2001 to 2005 from the 2001 and 2006 National Land Cover Dataset products (http://www.mrlc.gov/). These baseline LULC conditions were then used to guide the scenario-based modeling of future LULC change, using a spreadsheet accounting model to evaluate IPCC-SRES scenario demand and existing global model simulations. A detailed description of the downscaling process can be found in Sleeter and others (2012). The resulting ecoregion-based LULC scenarios were used to guide the spatially explicit "forecasting scenarios of land-cover change" (FORE-SCE) model in allocating LULC change distributions on the landscape, based on logistic regression analysis of the biogeophysical and socioeconomic determinants of landscape potential. What results are annual maps of baseline historical conditions from 1992 to 2005 and annual maps from 2006 to 2100 of future LULC for four of the IPCC SRES scenarios as presented in: Sohl and others, in press
The baseline historical map filenames appear as follows: "CONUS_Historical_(year)," the spatial extent is the conterminous United States as signified with "CONUS" the year is signified with y#### (e.g. y1992 = the year 1992). The projected maps of LULC are named as follows: "CONUS (scenario)_(year)". For example the filename "CONUS_a1b_y2006" represents projected LULC for the conterminous United States under the A1B scenario for the year 2006.
