Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) Puerto Rico USVI Year of Highest Probability of Gain (Image Service)

This product is part of the Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) data suite. It is a summary of all annual gain into a single layer showing the year LCMS detected gain with the highest model confidence.<div><br /></div><div>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 &quot;best available&quot; 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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).</div><div><br /></div><div>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.</div>

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