NASA WELD Project: 30m Land Cover Change for CONUS and Alaska, 2002-2012

Contiguous United States and Alaska land cover data at 30-meter resolution, generated from composited Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) mosaics. The dataset includes a specific 5-year land cover land use change (LCLUC) product for CONUS covering the growing seasons from April 15, 2006, to November 17, 2010. It was produced by NASA in collaboration with the USGS EROS Center and South Dakota State University's GSCE.

Use Cases

• Monitoring tree cover loss and bare ground gain over a multi-year period based on the described land change product.
• Deriving consistent geophysical and biophysical products for regional studies based on the composited Landsat ETM+ mosaics.
• Analyzing land use change patterns in the contiguous United States during the 2006-2010 growing seasons.
• Studying surface dynamics in Alaska using the latitude/longitude (LL) products that account for actual center pixel coordinates.

Strengths

• Provides 30-meter resolution data, which suggests a relatively high spatial detail for land cover analysis.
• Covers a defined 5-year period (2006-2010) for CONUS and a broader decade (2002-2012) for the full project, enabling temporal trend analysis.
• Funded by NASA and created in collaboration with authoritative institutions like USGS EROS and SDSU.

Limitations

• The dataset was decommissioned on December 2, 2019, and users are directed to newer GWELD versions, indicating it is not the current standard.
• Description metadata is limited; actual data structure, file formats, and known issues require consulting the separate User Guide.
• Row count and total data size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML projects.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center, South Dakota State University (SDSU) Geospatial Sciences Center of Excellence (GSCE).

Collection Method

Generated from composited 30-meter Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) mosaics.

Time Range

2002 to 2012, with a specific 5-year LCLUC product from 2006-2010.

Freshness

Dataset was decommissioned in 2019; temporal coverage ends in 2012.

Geography

Contiguous United States (CONUS) and Alaska.