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Conterminous United States Land Cover Projections - 1992 to 2100

Metadata Updated: October 28, 2023

The USGS’s FORE-SCE model was used to produce land-use and land-cover (LULC) projections for the conterminous United States. The projections were originally created as part of the "LandCarbon" project, an effort to understand biological carbon sequestration potential in the United States. However, the projections are being used for a wide variety of purposes, including analyses of the effects of landscape change on biodiversity, water quality, and regional weather and climate. The year 1992 served as the baseline for the landscape modeling. The 1992 to 2005 period was considered the historical baseline, with datasets such as the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), USGS Land Cover Trends, and US Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture used to guide the recreation of historical land cover for this period. 2006 to 2100 was considered the future projection time frame. Four scenarios were modeled for 2006 to 2100, corresponding to four major scenario storylines from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES). The global IPCC SRES (A1B, A2, B1, and B2 scenarios) were downscaled to ecoregions in the conterminous United States, with the USGS Forecasting Scenarios of land use (FORE-SCE) model used to produce landscape projections consistent with the IPCC SRES. The land-use scenarios focused on socioeconomic impacts on anthropogenic land use (demographics, energy use, agricultural economics, and other socioeconomic considerations). The projections provided here are characterized by: 1) 250-meter spatial resolution (250-m pixels) 2) 17 land-cover classes, similar to classes from NLCD 3) Annual land cover maps from 1992 to 2100 4) Spatial coverage for the entire conterminous United States 5) An additional "forest stand age" layer for both the historical period (1992-2005) and the projected period (2006-2100). These data mark age in years since last land-use change or disturbance for forest pixels. Data are provided here for 1) the historical 1992 to 2005 period, and 2) for each of the four scenarios from 2006 to 2100. 10 .zip files are available for download, 5 representing land-use and land-cover maps for both the historical period and the four future scenarios, and 5 representing forest stand age. Each zip file contains GeoTIFF files with annual maps for the given timeframe. The metadata associated with this data release provides a key for identifying file names associated with each of the .zip files, as well as definitions for the 17 land-cover classes.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date October 28, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI EDI

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date June 1, 2023
Metadata Updated Date October 28, 2023
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
@Id http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/115833310fe5fe791c88e3e02d4e943a
Identifier USGS:5b96c2f9e4b0702d0e826f6d
Data Last Modified 20200818
Category geospatial
Category Tag 16E15F51 D96E 4051 9124 75665Abdc6Ff "Ecosystem Vulnerability","Carbon Balance"
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://datainventory.doi.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id c1a5fc3d-eb35-4897-bf54-e0a0b742f3bf
Harvest Source Id 52bfcc16-6e15-478f-809a-b1bc76f1aeda
Harvest Source Title DOI EDI
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -125.15167596785,23.673440501823,-66.264957220208,49.000932513965
Publisher Hierarchy White House > U.S. Department of the Interior > U.S. Geological Survey
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 92854592c6ac051b49b4ee5477b98aa0e3491fa2a2735bce07fff032248cef08
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -125.15167596785, 23.673440501823, -125.15167596785, 49.000932513965, -66.264957220208, 49.000932513965, -66.264957220208, 23.673440501823, -125.15167596785, 23.673440501823}

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