National Land Cover Database

NOTE: This webpage refers to the Legacy National Land Cover Database (NLCD). Please visit Annual NLCD for the latest release.

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Legacy NLCD includes map products characterizing land cover and land cover change across nine epochs from 2001 to 2021 (2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021) for the conterminous U.S. The 2021 suite of NLCD products follow the same protocols and procedures of the previously released NLCD epochs (2001-2019), are directly comparable to the 2019 release across the full time series, and are suitable for multi-temporal analysis. Science products and the change index, however, will need to be reacquired for the additional 2021 change information.  

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) works closely with the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium—a collaborative group of federal agencies—to produce the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) for the conterminous U.S.  The MRLC, a consortium of federal agencies who coordinate and generate consistent and relevant land cover information at the national scale for a wide variety of environmental, land management, and modeling applications, have been providing the scientific community with detailed land cover products for more than 30 years. Over that time, NLCD has been one of the most widely used geospatial datasets in the U.S., serving as a basis for understanding the Nation’s landscapes in thousands of studies and applications, trusted by scientists, land managers, students, city planners, and many more as a definitive source of U.S. land cover.  

Specific map products include: 

1. Land cover – Conterminous U.S. land cover at a 30-meter spatial resolution with a 16-class legend based on a modified Anderson Level II classification system 
2. Land cover change index – Provides a simple and comprehensive way to visualize change that occurred across all the NLCD epochs of land cover 
3. Urban imperviousness – Indicates urban impervious surfaces as a percentage of developed surface over every 30-meter pixel in the Conterminous U.S. 
4. Urban impervious descriptor – Classifies specific types of roads, wind tower sites, building locations, and energy production sites to allow a deeper analysis of developed features 
5. NLCD Science Products 
   1. Land Cover Change Disturbance Date – Identifies the first land cover classification change event between any two adjacent target years across all NLCD epochs at the 30-meter pixel level 
   2. Forest Disturbance Date – Identifies the most recent year of forest disturbance between the years 1984–2021 
   3. Land Cover Change Count – Calculates an integer count total of any change recorded between two consecutive epochs 
   4. Land Cover with additional Forest Transition Classes – Delineates spectrally stable grass and shrub areas from those that are transitional forest classes, which tend to be represented by forest harvest, burns, regrowth, and other disturbances  
   5. U.S. Forest Service Science Tree Canopy Cover – The original, unmasked Tree Cover Canopy data produced by the U.S. Forest Service, an MRLC partner 

For more information about Legacy NLCD visit the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) Products - ScienceBase-Catalog