National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2016 Land Cover Science Product

Publication Date

2019-11-26

Start Date

2001

End Date

2016

Dewitz, J., 2019, National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2016 Products (ver. 3.0, November 2023): U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P96HHBIE.

Type: Online Link Type: Related Primary Publication

To better develop NLCD 2016 landcover, spectrally stable grass and shrub areas were separated from the spectrally changing areas of shrub and grass represented by forest harvest, burns, regrowth, and other disturbances. Essentially, this separation usually identifies shrub and grass climax areas from shrub and grass areas in transition back to a forest. This difference is expressed with two extra classes of land cover, called Shrub-Forest and Herbaceous-Forest which are representing areas of current shrub and grass expected to transition back to a forest. Alternatively, the shrub and grass classes of Shrub/Scrub and Grassland/Herbaceous will likely not transition to a forest. However, be cautioned that no extensive ecological analysis went into these class delineations, they are primarily spectral based separations used to delineate broad classes of grass and shrub. The change index associated with this and the regular NLCD classes are identical.

ScienceBase WMS

• Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS)

Data source

Input directly