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The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium - 20 Years of Development and Integration of U.S. National Land Cover Data
Citation:
Wickham, J., C. Homer, J. Fry, A. McKerrow, R. Mueller, N. Herold, AND J. Coulston. The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium - 20 Years of Development and Integration of U.S. National Land Cover Data. Remote Sensing. MDPI, Basel, Switzerland, 6(8):7424-7441, (2014).
Impact/Purpose:
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium is a bottom-up e-government initiative to provide digital land-cover and ancillary data for the nation. In part, the consortium organized in response to the 1984 Land Remote Sensing Commercialization Act.
Description:
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium is a good example of the national benefits of federal collaboration. It started in the mid-1990s as a small group of federal agencies with the straightforward goal of compiling a comprehensive national Landsat dataset that could be used to meet agencies’ needs. It has since grown into a group of 10 federal agencies that coordinate the production of six different products, including the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), the Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP), the Cropland Data Layer (CDL), the GAP Analysis Program (GAP), the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE), and the North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS). MRLC has become a collaborative forum, where members share research, methodological approaches, and data to produce products using established protocols. As a set, the products include almost every aspect of land cover from impervious surface to detailed crop types to fire fuel classes. Some products have now evolved to offer change analysis because they cover multiple time periods. We provide a brief overview of each of the main products produced by MRLC and examples of how each product has been used. We follow that with a discussion of the impact of the MRLC program and a brief overview of future plans