A Strategy for Estimating the Rates of Recent United States Land-Cover Changes

Abstract

This paper describes a strategy for estimating land-cover change at a national level over the past 30 years. Change rates for 84 ecoregions across the conterminous United States are estimated using a sampling procedure and five dates of Landsat imagery between 1973 and 2000. This methodology has been applied to six eastern U.S. ecoregions. Early results show very high rates of change in the Plains ecoregions, high to moderate rates in the Piedmont ecoregions and moderate to low rates in the Appalachian ecoregions. These results suggest that ecoregions are appropriate strata for capturing unique patterns of land-cover change and that manual interpretation provides the highest quality land-cover change results. Directions for future research are summarized.

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