Generation of a U.S. National Urban Land-Use Product

Abstract

This article will discuss how the characterization of urban land use is essential for many applications. Differentiating among thermatically-detailed urban land uses (residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, recreational, etc) over broad areas is challenging because imaged-based solutions are not ideal establishing the contextual basis for identifying economic function and use. At the present time there is no current United States national-scale mapping that exists for urban land uses similar to the classical Anderson Level II classification. This article describes a product that maps urban land uses and is linked to and corresponds with the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2006. In this product, NCLD urban pixels, in addition to their current imperviousness intensity classification, are assigned one of nine urban use classes based on information drawn from multiple data sources. These sources include detailed infrastructure information, population characteristics, and historical land use. The result is a method for creating a 30 m national-scale grid providing thematically-detailed urban land use information which complements the NCLD. The initial results for ten major metropolitan areas are provided as an on-line link. Accuracy assessment of initial products yielded and overall accuracy of 81.6 percent.