Three panel view of Alaska from NLCD

These three panels from the National Land Cover Database depict land cover change in the vicinity of Fairbanks, AK, from 2001 to 2011. The left panel shows the status of the land cover in 2001 (forests in green, shrublands in brown, wetlands in blue and urban in red) The middle panel shows the updated land cover in 2011 and the right panel shows areas where change occurred over this 10 years. This change was caused by a wildfire which converted large areas of forests to shrub and grasslands (shades of light brown in the right panel). Approximately one million acres burn across Alaska each year