Land Use and Land Cover (LULC)

The Land Use and Land Cover data collection includes global and regional data sets related to the forms of land and the uses of that land, whether natural or influenced by humans.  Several of the data sets provide indices of the threat of potential development for setting conservation priorities.  Other data sets contain information on the human modification of the land, either by urban expansion or other anthropogenic stressors.  Also included are a mangrove land cover data set derived from Landsat imagery and a data set of Central American vegetation, and land cover types based on Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery.

Global Human Modification of Terrestrial Systems data set is based on modeling the physical extents of 13 anthropogenic stressors and their estimated impacts using spatially-explicit global data sets, while the Global Development Potential Indices data set provides global land suitability data for 13 sectors related to renewable energy, fossil fuels, mining and agriculture. The Development Threat Index data set is a global terrestrial development threat map produced by aggregating individual habitat threats such as agricultural expansion, urban expansion, mining, and energy (oil and gas, coal, biofuels, solar, and wind) development. The mangrove map was developed by Chandra Giri and colleagues and represents a baseline of circa year 2000 mangrove distribution.  Researchers at Yale and Texas A&M Universities, produced the global urban expansion grid, which is useful for understanding potential future areas of urban growth and losses of farm or natural lands. The Central American land cover mapping project assessed the degree to which both existing and proposed terrestrial protected area networks protect/would protect landscape-level biodiversity, which are represented as vegetation types delineated from remotely-sensed imagery.