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LAND USE LAND COVER (LULC) - US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
Description:
The National Mapping Program, a component of the U. S. Geological Survey (USGS), produces and distributes land use and land cover maps and digitized data for the conterminous U.S. and Hawaii. Land use refers to the human activities that are directly related to the land. The interpretations are based on a land use and land cover system developed for use with remotely sensed data. The hierarchical classification has 2 defined levels. Land cover describes the vegetation, water, natural surface, and man-made features of the land. Land use and land cover areas are classified into nine major categories: urban or built-up land, agricultural, rangeland, forest, water areas, wetland, barren land, tundra, and perennial snow or ice. Each general class is subdivided into several detailed level-2 classes. The land use and land cover data were collected from aerial photography acquired by NASA and USGS during the 1970s and 1980s. Manually interpreted land use and land cover polygons were compiled onto 1:250,000-scale USGS base maps. A few areas, including Hawaii, were compiled on 1:100,000-scale USGS maps. The land use and land cover maps were then digitized at the scale of the base map used in the original compilation. All maps were based upon the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection and the digitized data retains their UTM coordinates. This mapping system is designed to stay compatible with other resource fields such as soils, geology, hydrology, and demographic data sets. The data may be ordered on magnetic tape from USGS Earth Science Information Centers (ESICs). The data are available at no cost if retrieved through an anonymous Internet file transfer protocol (FTP) account at the EROS Data Center (EDC) or from the World Wide Web GeoData Document.