Landscape Change Monitoring System Conterminous United States Land Cover (Image Service)

This product is part of the Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) data suite. It shows LCMS modeled change classes for each year. See additional information about change in the Entity_and_Attribute_Information section below. LCMS is a remote sensing-based system for mapping and monitoring landscape change across the United States. Its objective is to develop a consistent approach using the latest technology and advancements in change detection to produce a 'best available' map of landscape change. Because no algorithm performs best in all situations, LCMS uses an ensemble of models as predictors, which improves map accuracy across a range of ecosystems and change processes (Healey et al., 2018). The resulting suite of LCMS change, land cover, and land use maps offer a holistic depiction of landscape change across the United States over the past four decades. Predictor layers for the LCMS model include annual Landsat and Sentinel 2 composites, outputs from the LandTrendr and CCDC change detection algorithms, and terrain information.These components are all accessed and processed using Google Earth Engine (Gorelick et al., 2017). To produce annual composites, the cFmask (Zhu and Woodcock 2012), cloudScore, and TDOM (Chastain et al., 2019) cloud and cloud shadow masking methods are applied to Landsat Tier 1 and Sentinel 2a and 2b Level-1C top of atmosphere reflectance data. The annual medoid is then computed to summarize each year into a single composite. The composite time series is temporally segmented using LandTrendr (Kennedy et al., 2010; Kennedy et al., 2018; Cohen et al., 2018). All cloud and cloud shadow free values are also temporally segmented using the CCDC algorithm (Zhu and Woodcock, 2014). The raw composite values, LandTrendr fitted values, pair-wise differences, segment duration, change magnitude, and slope, and CCDC September 1 sine and cosine coefficients (first 3 harmonics), fitted values, and pairwise differences, along with elevation, slope, sine of aspect, cosine of aspect, and topographic position indices (Weiss, 2001) from the National Elevation Dataset (NED), are used as independent predictor variables in a Random Forest (Breiman, 2001) model. Reference data are collected using TimeSync, a web-based tool that helps analysts visualize and interpret the Landsat data record from 1984-present (Cohen et al., 2010).Outputs fall into three categories: change, land cover, and land use. Change relates specifically to vegetation cover and includes slow loss, fast loss (which also includes hydrologic changes such as inundation or desiccation), and gain. These values are predicted for each year of the Landsat time series and serve as the foundational products for LCMS.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Source https://data-usfs.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/usfs::landscape-change-monitoring-system-conterminous-united-states-land-cover-image-service
Version
Author
Author Email
Maintainer
Maintainer Email
Shared (this field will be removed in the future) Open
IB1 Sensitivity Class
IB1 Trust Framework
IB1 Dataset Assurance
IB1 Trust Framework
GUID https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=a31f08baa2a94f818c9eef5cf52b213a
Language
dcat_issued 2021-02-18
dcat_modified 2022-08-29
dcat_publisher_name U.S. Forest Service
harvest_object_id d9d3bdf5-39da-4949-b7f9-11fd98b06f64
harvest_source_id 2c0b1e04-ba48-4488-9de5-0dab41f9913f
harvest_source_title USDA Open Data Catalog