In order to meet the requirements of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) for comprehensive resource and management plans from all major land management agencies in Alaska, the USGS has begun a program to classify land cover for the entire State using Landsat digital data. Vegetation and land cover classifications, generated in cooperation with other agencies, currently exist for 115 million acres of Alaska. Using these as a base, the USGS has prepared a comprehensive plan for classifying the remaining areas of the State. The development of this program will lead to a complete interim vegetation and land cover classification system for Alaska and allow the dissemination of digital data for those areas classified. At completion, 153 Alaska 1:250,000-scale quadrangles will be published and will include land cover from digital Landsat classifications, statistical summaries of all land cover by township, and computer-compatible tapes. An interagency working group has established an Alaska classification system (table 1) composed of 18 classes modified from "A land use and land cover classification system for use with remote sensor data" (Anderson and others, 1976), and from "Revision of a preliminary classification system for vegetation of Alaska" (Viereck and Dyrness, 1982) for the unique ecoregions which are found in Alaska.
