With the new release, the USGS builds on the popular Annual NLCD CU Collection 1.0, which debuted in October 2024 and included six annual land cover products for 1985-2023. Collection 1.1 adds 2024 to the temporal extent of Annual NLCD for a total of 40 years of land cover dynamics.

The NLCD project is a joint effort between the USGS and a group of federal agencies known as the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium. The group ensures that land cover information is consistent and relevant at the national scale, which can make it invaluable for a variety of resource monitoring and management activities, as well as input to numerous modeling applications.  

While Annual NLCD focuses on monitoring the surface of the Earth, it relies on data captured 438 miles up. Satellites in the Landsat Program provide the extensive time series of data required to characterize distinct features and change on the ground.

Annual NLCD Collection 1.1 adds 2024 to the established suite of six raster-based land use and land cover science products for the conterminous United States. It now covers the period between 1985 and 2024: 

1. Land Cover – This dataset provides 16 land cover classes such as deciduous and evergreen forest, grassland, cultivated crops and developed.
2. Land Cover Change – These data represent annual land cover changes from one year to the next.
3. Land Cover Confidence – This layer provides confidence levels for the land cover classifications.
4. Fractional Impervious Surface – This component provides the proportion of land covered by developed surfaces, such as roads and rooftops.
5. Impervious Descriptor – This feature offers additional information about impervious surfaces by distinguishing between roads and other built surfaces.
6. Spectral Change Day of Year – This attribute captures the specific day of the year when significant changes in surface reflectance occur. 

The Annual NLCD yearly update strategy was designed to ensure consistency with previous Collection product releases (i.e., 1.0), maintain reliability in time-series analyses and develop products in a resource-efficient manner. Users of the data can expect the core algorithms of Annual NLCD to remain stable throughout the duration of all Collection 1 product releases. Below details what’s new in Collection 1.1:

1. All new 2024 data for each of the six products listed above.
2. Updated Spectral Change Day of Year products for 2020-2023 to maintain consistency between spectral change characteristics and the downstream land cover products.
3. New ancillary file included alongside every Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) files for 1985-2024 to populate a more comprehensive raster attribute table. 

The Annual NLCD products are available for download on EarthExplorer, the MRLC Web Viewer, the MRLC Mosaic Download website, ScienceBase, as Annual NLCD web services, and through USGS AWS S3 (Oregon us-west-2 region). 

For quick and easy change analyses, try out the NLCD Enhanced Visualization and Analysis (EVA) tool. 

See more information on the Annual NLCD data access page.

For detailed product descriptions, methodology and data formatting, review the Science Product User Guide. 

Have questions about Annual NLCD? Email custserv@usgs.gov.

NLCD supports thousands of applications in the private, public and academic sectors. It has been used to develop land management policies, assess ecosystem status and health, and examine spatial patterns of biodiversity. It also serves as a critical data layer in national assessments of surface and ground water quality, wildfire monitoring and modeling, conservation efforts and more.