Developing a land change monitoring capability and supporting training data strategy for select international sites: First Outputs

The monitoring of landscape change is widely recognized as an important component towards understanding how the Earth changes and the impacts of, and to, human societies. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center has been developing a monitoring capability suitable for monitoring land change along with climate-related factors towards the long-term goal of assessing impacts on human society such as food security, water availability, emerging infectious diseases, economic security, human health, and others. A prototype capability, developed from the design of the Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) initiative, utilizes all available imagery in the USGS global Landsat 30-meter archive with the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) time-series modeling approach to produce annual land cover and change outputs. Landscape change results are input into assessment of urban heat island effects using the Landsat Land Surface Temperature record and monitor changes in Surface Urban Heat Island (SUHI) over a 35-year period. Development of this capability includes a cloud-based computing infrastructure to draw input data directly from the USGS global Landsat archive, adoption of regional equal-area coordinate systems, assessment of existing sources of land cover training data to be harmonized and/or sampled from, and strategies for navigating the extreme variability in existing Landsat data cover prior to the launch of Landsat-7 in 1999. This presentation discusses the challenges, solutions, and lessons learned of building and applying this new land monitoring capability in two regions outside the USA; the 90,000 km2 regions surrounding Wuhan, China and Brasilia, Brazil – both regions which have been subject to rapid urban development and anthropogenic impact in recent decades. Initial results from these regions for landscape change and impacts on changing urban heat island effects will be discussed.