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The USGS Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) initiative has released the third update to its conterminous United States (CONUS) science products, adding the most recent calendar year of data to an unparalleled annual land cover and land surface change time series that stretches back to 1985. 

Land cover maps
(A) U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) aerial imagery from November 15, 2021 over recently disturbed locations near Newnan, Georgia, located southwest of Atlanta. Examples include what appear to be (1) forest clearing for urban development, (2) part of a tornado scar from an EF4 tornado that struck Newnan on March 26, 2021, (3) a combination of disturbances including reforestation, and (4) forest harvest. (B) LCMAP Collection 1.3 Annual Land Cover Change from 2021 identified all four disturbances, shown in purple as land cover classification changes. (C) The LCMAP Collection 1.3 Time of Spectral Change product from 2020 and 2021 shows when spectral changes occurred in 2020 and 2021, grouped by month, including the tornado scar showing changes in April 2021 after the late March tornado. (D) The LCMAP Collection 1.3 Spectral Change Magnitude product, which shows the intensity of a spectral model break, with more drastic changes such as forest clearing in shades of blue and more subtle changes like forest regrowth or tornado damage in shades of green.

Collection 1.3 extends LCMAP’s record to 37 years, characterizing the landscapes across CONUS at 30-meter resolution from 1985-2021. The 10-product suite can be used to capture the dynamics of wetlands in growth or decline, characterize the ephemeral impacts of hurricanes or rapidly-shifting mining operations, track the pace of coastal erosion or urban growth, observe the progression of fires, monitor recovery from mudslides and wildfires, and much more. LCMAP products can also serve as a complement to other USGS Landsat-based mapping efforts, such as the National Land Cover Database, LANDFIRE, Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity, and others. 

Tiled and bundled LCMAP Collection 1.3 data products are now available through EarthExplorer. The data are also available for visualization and download using the LCMAP Web Viewer and Web Map Service (WMS) Endpoint. Full mosaics over CONUS by product-year are available through the LCMAP Mosaic Download Site. The mosaics are distributed as internally tiled and compressed GeoTIFFs that allow direct access to the data. 

Additional reference data for Collection 1.3 from 2019-2021 are being collected and will be made publicly available at a later date. The results of a validation assessment of the LCMAP Collection (1985-2021) will also be made available in the future through ScienceBase. 

To learn more about LCMAP Collection 1.3, please visit the product page

Be sure to subscribe to the LCMAP listserv to keep up with product news and updates. 

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