Chesapeake Bay Watershed Land Cover with High-Resolution Imagery and Labels

Chesapeake Bay watershed land cover data integrates high-resolution aerial imagery from USDA NAIP, six-class land cover labels from the Chesapeake Conservancy, and additional layers from USGS NLCD, Landsat 8, and Microsoft Bing. The Chesapeake Conservancy spent over 10 months and $1.3 million creating the core land cover dataset. The collection is formatted for machine learning research and was last updated in 2023.

Use Cases

• Train semantic segmentation models to predict the Chesapeake Conservancy's six-class land cover labels from high-resolution NAIP aerial imagery.
• Develop building footprint detection models using the high-resolution building mask layer from Microsoft Bing.
• Perform multi-source data fusion by combining low-resolution Landsat 8 multi-spectral imagery with high-resolution NAIP imagery for land cover analysis.
• Compare land cover classification performance between high-resolution Chesapeake Conservancy labels and low-resolution USGS NLCD 2011 labels.
• Create change detection models by using the consistent land cover classification as a baseline for future aerial imagery.

Strengths

• Core land cover labels were created over 10 months with a $1.3 million investment, ensuring detail.
• Integrates multiple authoritative data sources (USDA NAIP, Chesapeake Conservancy, USGS NLCD, Landsat 8, Microsoft Bing).
• Data is specifically formatted to accelerate machine learning research for land cover mapping.

Limitations

• The core USGS NLCD land cover labels are from 2011, which may be stale for detecting recent land use changes.
• Geographic scope is limited to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, limiting model generalizability to other regions without transfer learning.
• Specific row counts, file sizes, and sample balances for the integrated dataset are not provided.

Provenance

Source

MLHUB, aggregating data from NASA Earthdata, USDA NAIP, Chesapeake Conservancy, USGS NLCD, Landsat 8, and Microsoft Bing.

Collection Method

High-resolution labels were manually created by the Chesapeake Conservancy; other layers are from established remote sensing programs.

Time Range

Temporal coverage varies by source layer; NLCD labels are from 2011.

Freshness

Last updated in 2023, but some source data (e.g., USGS NLCD) is older.

Geography

Chesapeake Bay watershed in the United States.