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Modeled Historical Land Use and Land Cover for the Conterminous United States: 1938-1992

The landscape of the conterminous United States has changed dramatically over the last 200 years, with agricultural land use, urban expansion, forestry, and other anthropogenic activities altering land cover across vast swaths of the country. While land use and land cover (LULC) models have been developed to model potential future LULC change, few efforts have focused on recreating historical landscapes. Researchers at the US Geological Survey have used a wide range of historical data sources and a spatially explicit modeling framework to model spatially explicit historical LULC change in the conterminous United States from 1992 back to 1938. Annual LULC maps were produced at 250-m resolution, with 14 LULC classes. Assessment of model results showed good agreement with trends and spatial patterns in historical data sources such as the Census of Agriculture and historical housing density data, although comparison with historical data is complicated by definitional and methodological differences. The completion of this dataset allows researchers to assess historical LULC impacts on a range of ecological processes.

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Author(s) Terry L Sohl orcid
Publication Date 2018
Beginning Date of Data 1938
Ending Date of Data 1992
Data Contact
DOI https://doi.org/10.5066/F7KK99RR
Citation Sohl, T.L., 2018, Modeled Historical Land Use and Land Cover for the Conterminous United States: 1938-1992: U.S. Geological Survey data release, https://doi.org/10.5066/F7KK99RR.
Metadata Contact
Metadata Date 2020-08-18
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Citations of these data No citations of these data are known at this time.
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License http://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
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Harvest Source: ScienceBase
Harvest Date: 2025-03-31T07:43:42.988Z