GCAM Land Cover Projections for Conterminous USA Under Three Climate Scenarios

Conterminous United States land cover projections from 2005 to 2095, generated by NASA using the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) Version 3.1. The dataset provides annual percentage coverage for 19 land cover classes at a 5.6 km resolution across three distinct climate mitigation scenarios. It consists of three NetCDF files, each modeling a different future pathway for carbon emissions and radiative forcing.

Use Cases

• Modeling future shifts in cropland, grassland, shrubland, and forest coverage using the 19 plant functional type percentages.
• Comparing land cover change trajectories between a high-emission reference scenario and two mitigation pathways (2.6 W/m² and 4.5 W/m²).
• Integrating downscaled GCAM outputs into regional climate or ecological models via the provided NetCDF geospatial files.
• Analyzing temporal trends in specific land cover classes from 2005 to 2095 at a 0.05-degree grid resolution.

Strengths

• Provides a 90-year time series (2005-2095) of annual projections.
• Includes 19 distinct land cover classes (Plant Functional Types) from the Community Land Model.
• Offers comparisons across three detailed climate scenarios with specific radiative forcing targets (e.g., 2.6, 4.5, and >7 W/m²).
• Data is downscaled to a high spatial resolution of approximately 5.6 km for the conterminous USA.

Limitations

• Conflicting metadata: one source lists a last updated date in 2095, while another lists March 2026, creating uncertainty about the dataset's actual currency.
• Specific row counts, file sizes, and detailed column names are not provided across platforms.
• License is ambiguously noted as 'other-license-specified' without clear terms.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) Version 3.1 outputs downscaled to ~5.6 km resolution.

Time Range

2005-2095

Freshness

2026-03-13 03:13:50.056290

Geography

Conterminous United States