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 to 2016. For land cover, seven epochs were concurrently generated for years 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, and 2016. Products reveal that land cover change is significant across most land cover classes and time periods. The land cover product was validated using existing reference data from the legacy NLCD 2011 accuracy assessment, applied to the 2011 epoch of the NLCD 2016 product line. The legacy and new NLCD 2011 overall accuracies were 82% and 83%, respectively, (standard error (SE) was 0.5%), demonstrating a small but significant increase in overall accuracy. Between 2001 and 2016, the CONUS landscape experienced significant change, with almost 8% of the landscape having experienced a land cover change at least once during this period. Nearly 50% of that change involves forest, driven by change agents of harvest, fire, disease and pests that resulted in an overall forest decline, including increasing fragmentation and loss of interior forest. Agricultural change represented 15.9% of the change, with total agricultural spatial extent showing only a slight increase of 4778 km², however there was a substantial decline (7.94%) in pasture/hay during this time, transitioning mostly to cultivated crop. Water and wetland change comprised 15.2% of change and represent highly dynamic land cover classes from epoch to epoch, heavily influenced by precipitation. Grass and shrub change comprise 14.5% of the total change, with most change resulting from fire. Developed change was the most persistent and permanent land change increase adding almost 29,000 km² over 15 years (5.6% of total CONUS change), with southern states exhibiting expansion much faster than most of the northern states. Temporal rates of developed change increased in 2001–2006 at twice the rate of 2011–2016, reflecting a slowdown in CONUS economic activity. Future NLCD plans include increasing monitoring frequency, reducing latency time between satellite imaging and product delivery, improving accuracy and expanding the variety of products available in an integrated database.

The increased availability of mapped environmental data calls for better tools to analyze the spatial characteristics and information contained in those maps. Publicly available, user-friendly and universal tools are needed to foster the interdisciplinary development and application of methodologies for the extraction of image object information properties contained in digital raster maps. That is the overarching goal of GuidosToolbox, which is a set of customized, thematically grouped raster image analysis methodologies provided in a graphical user interface and for all popular operating systems. The Toolbox contains a wide selection of dedicated algorithms and tools, which are complemented by batch-processing and pre- and post-processing routines, all designed to objectively describe and quantify various spatial properties of image objects in digital raster data. While first developed for the analysis of remote sensing data in environmental applications, the Toolbox now provides a generic framework that is applicable to image analysis at any scale and for any kind of digital raster data.

Riitters, K., J. Wickham, R. O'Neill, B. Jones, and E. Smith. 2000. Global-scale patterns of forest fragmentation. Conservation Ecology 4(2): 3.

Wade, T. G., K. Riitters, J. D. Wickham and K. Jones 2003. Distribution and causes of global forest fragmentation. Conservation Ecology 7(2): 7. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-00530-070207