Abstract
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium demonstrates the national benefits of USA Federal collaboration. Starting in the mid-1990s as a small group with the straightforward goal of compiling a comprehensive national Landsat dataset that could be used to meet agencies’ needs, MRLC has grown into a group of 10 USA Federal Agencies that coordinate the production of five different products, including the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), the Coastal Change Analysis Program (C-CAP), the Cropland Data Layer (CDL), the Gap Analysis Program (GAP), and the Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools (LANDFIRE). As a set, the products include almost every aspect of land cover from impervious surface to detailed crop and vegetation types to fire fuel classes. Some products can be used for land cover change assessments because they cover multiple time periods. The MRLC Consortium has become a collaborative forum, where members share research, methodological approaches, and data to produce products using established protocols, and we believe it is a model for the production of integrated land cover products at national to continental scales. We provide a brief overview of each of the main products produced by MRLC and examples of how each product has been used. We follow that with a discussion of the impact of the MRLC program and a brief overview of future plans.
Highlights
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium is a bottom-up e-government initiative to provide digital land cover and ancillary data for the nation
Layer is a land cover dataset that includes a detailed legend of crop types that is produced by the USA Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) and distributed through an interactive data visualization portal called CropScape
The MRLC consortium started as a small group with the modest goal of pooling resources to purchase Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) imagery for the continental United States
Summary
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium is a bottom-up e-government initiative to provide digital land cover and ancillary data for the nation. LANDFIRE partnered with NLCD to help build the MRLC Landsat image archive and use NLCD land cover to more efficiently map some LANDFIRE data layers. The outcome of this integration was that MRLC became an organizing framework for the development of several national products that cost-effectively used the same Landsat database and classification technology. The high cost of Landsat data, a reality that contributed to the formation of MRLC, is no longer relevant, pooling of resources to produce land cover products that meet all agencies’ needs is still a cost-efficient production model. LANDFIRE classes are a simplification of the 13 Anderson fire behavior fuels models [11]
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