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Jon Dewitz

NLCD Technical and Production Manager, Physical Scientist, Affiliate Faculty U. of Alaska Fairbanks, USGS EROS Center

 

Career History and Highlights: Jon Dewitz started with the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) in 2001 as the QA/QC lead and external contracting manager for the project. He was promoted to technical lead in 2008 with the USGS, and is currently both the technical and production manager. Over the years he has managed and trained all the members of the NLCD team as well as leading the release and production efforts for all NLCD products (excluding NLCD92). Dewitz has also led efforts to modernize Landcover mapping for the project through virtualization and scripting. These efforts include prototyping and designing the current NLCD and NLCD Shrub (a sister project to NLCD focused on rangeland ecosystems in the western U.S.) processing systems. Dewitz also led all Alaska mapping efforts and was affiliate faculty with the University of Alaska for joint research and mapping efforts. Jon is the CITT and Science branch project representative and the go to for any questions relating to NLCD Publications.

Education and Certifications

  • MS in Geography from South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD

  • BS in Management Information Systems from Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD

  • The equivalent of a BS in Physics and Biology from North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND

Science and Products

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Screen shot of the National Land Cover Dataset

National Land Cover Database

EROS is central to the creation of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), which is updated every two to three years and stands as the definitive land cover database for the United States.
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Ecosystems Mission Area, Land Change Science Program, Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center
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National Land Cover Database

EROS is central to the creation of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), which is updated every two to three years and stands as the definitive land cover database for the United States.
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USGS science for a changing world logo

National Land Cover Database Visualization and Information Tool

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) serves as the definitive Landsat-based, 30-meter resolution, land cover database for the Nation. NLCD supports a wide variety of Federal, State, local, and nongovernmental applications that seek to assess ecosystem status and health, understand the spatial patterns of biodiversity, predict effects of climate change, and develop land management policy. Howeve
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Community for Data Integration (CDI)
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National Land Cover Database Visualization and Information Tool

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) serves as the definitive Landsat-based, 30-meter resolution, land cover database for the Nation. NLCD supports a wide variety of Federal, State, local, and nongovernmental applications that seek to assess ecosystem status and health, understand the spatial patterns of biodiversity, predict effects of climate change, and develop land management policy. Howeve
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National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2021 Products

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with several federal agencies, has now developed and released seven National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products: NLCD 1992, 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, 2019, and 2021. Beginning with the 2016 release, land cover products were created for two-to-three-year intervals between 2001 and the most recent year. These products provide spatially explicit and re
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2019 Products

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with several federal agencies, has developed and released five National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products over the past two decades: NLCD 1992, 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2016. The 2016 release saw landcover created for additional years of 2003, 2008, and 2013. These products provide spatially explicit and reliable information on the Nation?s land cov
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2016 Products (ver. 3.0, November 2023)

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with several federal agencies, has developed and released four National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products over the past two decades: NLCD 1992, 2001, 2006, and 2011. These products provide spatially explicit and reliable information on the Nation�s land cover and land cover change. To continue the legacy of NLCD and further establish a long-ter
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

NLCD 2016

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with several federal agencies, has developed and released four National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products over the past two decades: NLCD 1992, 2001, 2006, and 2011. These products provide spatially explicit and reliable information on the Nation's land cover and land cover change. To continue the legacy of NLCD and further establish a long-term
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center
USGS scientists gathered around a computer at an LCMAP workshop
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USGS EROS Scientists at LCMAP workshop
Filter Total Items: 16

Thematic accuracy assessment of the NLCD 2019 land cover for the conterminous United States

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD), a product suite produced through the MultiResolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium, is an operational land cover monitoring program. Starting from a base year of 2001, NLCD releases a land cover database every 2–3-years. The recent release of NLCD2019 extends the database to 18 years. We implemented a stratified random sample to collect land cover
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James Wickham, Stephen V. Stehman, Daniel G. Sorenson, Leila Gass, Jon Dewitz
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center , Western Geographic Science Center

National Land Cover Database 2019: A comprehensive strategy for creating the 1986-2019 forest disturbance product

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2016 products show that, between 2001 and 2016, nearly half of the land cover change in the conterminous United States (CONUS) involved forested areas. To ensure the quality of NLCD land cover and land cover change products, it is important to accurately detect the location and time of forest disturbance. We designed a comprehensive strategy to integrate a c
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Suming Jin, Jon Dewitz, Congcong Li, Daniel G. Sorenson, Zhe Zhu, Rakibul Shogib, Patrick Danielson, Brian Granneman, Catherine Costello, Adam Case, Leila Gass
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

National Land Cover Database 2019: A new strategy for creating clean leaf-on and leaf-off Landsat composite images

National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2019 is a new epoch of national land cover products for the conterminous United States. Image quality is fundamental to the quality of any land cover product. Image preprocessing has often taken a considerable proportion of overall time and effort for this kind of national project. An approach to prepare image inputs for NLCD 2019 production was developed to ens
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Suming Jin, Jon Dewitz, Patrick Danielson, Brian Granneman, Catherine Costello, Zhe Zhu
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Science Synthesis, Analysis and Research Program, Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center , Advanced Research Computing (ARC)

Where forest may not return in the western United States

Droughts that are hotter, more frequent, and last longer; pest outbreaks that are more extensive and more common; and fires that are more frequent, more extensive, and perhaps more severe have raised concern that forests in the western United States may not return once disturbed by one or more of these agents. Numerous field-based studies have been undertaken to better understand forest response t
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James Wickham, Anne Neale, Kurt H. Riitters, Maliha Nash, Jon Dewitz, Suming Jin, Megan van Fossen, D Rosenbaum
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

Conterminous United States land cover change patterns 2001–2016 from the 2016 National Land Cover Database

The 2016 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) product suite (available on www.mrlc.gov), includes Landsat-based, 30 m resolution products over the conterminous (CONUS) United States (U.S.) for land cover, urban imperviousness, and tree, shrub, herbaceous and bare ground fractional percentages. The release of NLCD 2016 provides important new information on land change patterns across CONUS from 2001
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Collin G. Homer, Jon Dewitz, Suming Jin, George Z. Xian, Catherine Costello, Patrick Danielson, Leila Gass, Michelle Funk, James Wickham, Steven Stehman, Roger F. Auch, Kurt H. Riitters
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

Performances of WorldView-3, Sentinel-2, and Landsat-8 data in mapping impervious surface

Many efforts have been made to map developed impervious surface from remotely sensed information in the last two decades. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) developed the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) to provide consistent land cover and change products for the Nation since 2001. Percent impervious surface area (ISA), one of the products in NLCD as a continuous field and estimated with Landsa
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George Z. Xian, Hua Shi, Jon Dewitz, Zhuoting Wu
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

Analysis of different sensor performances in impervious surface mapping

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has developed the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) to provide consistent land cover and land cover change products for the nation since 2001. As one of products in the NLCD, the percent impervious surface area (ISA), which was estimated with Landsat imagery, represents the fraction of human-made impervious area in a 30-m grid and has been used to quantify urban
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George Z. Xian, Hua Shi, Jon Dewitz, Zhuoting Wu
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

A new generation of the United States National Land Cover Database: Requirements, research priorities, design, and implementation strategies

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in partnership with several federal agencies, has developed and released four National Land Cover Database (NLCD) products over the past two decades: NLCD 1992, 2001, 2006, and 2011. These products provide spatially explicit and reliable information on the Nation’s land cover and land cover change. To continue the legacy of NLCD and further establish a long-term
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Limin Yang, Suming Jin, Patrick Danielson, Collin Homer, Leila Gass, Stacie M Bender, Adam Case, Catherine Costello, Jon Dewitz, Joyce Fry, Michelle Funk, Brian J. Granneman, Greg C Liknes, Matthew B. Rigge, George Z. Xian
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

Thematic accuracy assessment of the 2011 National Land Cover Database (NLCD)

Accuracy assessment is a standard protocol of National Land Cover Database (NLCD) mapping. Here we report agreement statistics between map and reference labels for NLCD 2011, which includes land cover for ca. 2001, ca. 2006, and ca. 2011. The two main objectives were assessment of agreement between map and reference labels for the three, single-date NLCD land cover products at Level II and Level I
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James Wickham, Stephen V. Stehman, Leila Gass, Jon Dewitz, Daniel G. Sorenson, Brian J. Granneman, Richard V. Poss, Lori Anne Baer
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center , Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center, Western Geographic Science Center

A comparison of NLCD 2011 and LANDFIRE EVT 2010: Regional and national summaries.

In order to provide the land cover user community a summary of the similarity and differences between the 2011 National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) and the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Program Existing Vegetation 2010 Data (LANDFIRE EVT), the two datasets were compared at a national (conterminous U.S.) and regional (Eastern, Midwestern, and Western) extents (Figure 1). The c
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Alexa McKerrow, Jon Dewitz, Donald G. Long, Kurtis Nelson, Joel A. Connot, Jim Smith
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Core Science Systems Mission Area, Science Synthesis, Analysis and Research Program, Science Analytics and Synthesis (SAS) Program, Gap Analysis Project

Completion of the 2011 National Land Cover Database for the conterminous United States – Representing a decade of land cover change information

The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) provides nationwide data on land cover and land cover change at the native 30-m spatial resolution of the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM). The database is designed to provide five-year cyclical updating of United States land cover and associated changes. The recent release of NLCD 2011 products now represents a decade of consistently produced land cover and imp
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Collin G. Homer, Jon Dewitz, Limin Yang, Suming Jin, Patrick Danielson, George Z. Xian, John Coulston, Nathaniel Herold, James Wickham, Kevin Megown
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center

Accuracy assessment of NLCD 2006 land cover and impervious surface

Release of NLCD 2006 provides the first wall-to-wall land-cover change database for the conterminous United States from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data. Accuracy assessment of NLCD 2006 focused on four primary products: 2001 land cover, 2006 land cover, land-cover change between 2001 and 2006, and impervious surface change between 2001 and 2006. The accuracy assessment was conducted by selecting
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James D. Wickham, Stephen V. Stehman, Leila Gass, Jon Dewitz, Joyce A. Fry, Timothy G. Wade
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Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center
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NLCD 2021 Now Available

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in association with the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium, is pleased to announce the...

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New Land Cover Maps Capture Nearly Two Decades of Change Across the U.S.

The U.S. Geological Survey recently released updated land cover maps for the conterminous United States that depict 18 years of change to the Nation’s...

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New USGS EROS Tool Shows County-By-County Change Across United States

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center has released a new online tool to help the public better visualize county-by-county...

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Land Cover Partnership Releases Change Datasets for U.S., Mexico, Canada

The release of a change dataset for North America’s three largest countries will enable GIS researchers to more easily study continent-scale land use...

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Rangeland Mapping Tools Take Users Back in Time Across Western U.S.

The USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center and Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management have just released an...

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NLCD Readies Improvements for Upcoming Release of 2019 Product Suite

The next edition of the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) will appear more quickly than previous editions, offer accuracy comparable to NLCD 2016...

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EROS Research Presented at AGU

The American Geophysical Union’s Fall Meeting takes place Dec. 10-14 in Washington, D.C. The work of the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science...

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Science and Products