Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) Conterminous United States Annual Change

<div style='text-align:Left;'><div><div><p><span>This product is part of the Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) data suite. It supplies LCMS Change classes for each year that are a refinement of the modeled LCMS Change classes (Slow Loss, Fast Loss, and Gain) and provide information on the cause of landscape change. See additional information about Change in the Entity_and_Attribute_Information or Fields section below.</span></p><p><span>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.</span></p><p><span>Predictor layers for the LCMS model include 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, Cloud Score + (Pasquarella et al., 2023), 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). LandTrendr, CCDC and terrain predictors can be used as independent predictor variables in a Random Forest (Breiman, 2001) model. LandTrendr predictor variables include fitted values, pair-wise differences, segment duration, change magnitude, and slope. CCDC predictor variables include CCDC sine and cosine coefficients (first 3 harmonics), fitted values, and pairwise differences from the Julian Day of each pixel used in the annual composites and LandTrendr. Terrain predictor variables include elevation, slope, sine of aspect, cosine of aspect, and topographic position indices (Weiss, 2001) from the USGS 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) (U.S. Geological Survey, 2019). 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).</span></p><p><span>Outputs fall into three categories: Change, Land Cover, and Land Use. At its foundation, Change maps areas of Disturbance, Vegetation Successional Growth, and Stable landscape. More detailed levels of Change products are available and are intended to address needs centered around monitoring causes and types of variations in vegetation cover, water extent, or snow/ice extent that may or may not result in a transition of land cover and/or land use. Change, Land Cover, and Land Use are predicted for each year of the time series and serve as the foundational products for LCMS. </span></p></div></div></div>

Tags: basemaps, change-detection, continuous, digital-spatial-data, earthcover, environment, gis, imagery, land-cover, land-cover-change, land-use, land-use-change, land-use-land-cover-theme, national-geospatial-data-asset, ngda, remote-sensing
Organization: Department of Agriculture