Coincident maps of changing land cover, land use, and forest condition in the United States, 1985-present.

Maps of land cover class are more common, and generally more accurate, than maps of land use because "use" implies management intent that may not be directly sensible by earth-observing satellites. However, many monitoring frameworks related to sustainability require land use and land cover to be explicitly differentiated. This is particularly true for forests, where natural and human-caused dynamics in tree cover often occur independently of long-term land use changes that signal deforestation. We used an extensive multi-temporal, multi-variate sample of reference points across the United States to calibrate and validate 30 m mapped time series (1985-present) of land cover, land use, and vegetation condition change. These maps comprise the Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) and are served through: an interactive, open-access app; Google Earth Engine; image services; and the FSGeodata Clearinghouse. Here, we provide methods, validation metrics, and a usage example highlighting the value of differentiating use from cover in the context of model-assisted estimation of forest area using U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service inventory data.