Coweeta LTER created incremental land cover classifications along five year intervals for the southern Appalachian Mountains in order to assist researchers efforts to study change in land cover over time. Recently the United States Geologic Survey (USGS) has published land cover for this area, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), dated 2001. Coweeta adopted USGS methodologies to create land cover datasets for 1986 onward using available Landsat imagery. In the future as imagery becomes available, Coweeta LTER plans to create another classification every 5 years, beginning with 2006, 2011, etc.

View and Download Land Cover

Developing Land Cover Classification
The NLCD 2001 dataset was developed by the Natural Resources Spatial Analysis Laboratory (NARSAL) at the Institute of Ecology, University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. Coweeta LTER has worked in collaboration with NARSAL to develop the new classifications using methods as close as possible to those used in developing NLCD 2001 of zone 57 of the Southeast Gap Analysis Project.