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NORTH AMERICAN LANDSCAPE CHARACTERIZATION: 
TWO DECADES OF LAND COVER CHANGE 
Ross S. Lunetta 
James Sturdevant 
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 
Environmental Monitoring Systems Laboratory 
944, E. Harmon Street 
Las Vegas, Nevada 89193-3478, USA 
ISPRS Commission VII / Working Group 6 
ABSTRACT 
The North American Landscape Characterization (NACL) is a project designed to derive the record of 
land cover change across large sections of North America from the 1970's to the early 1990's using 
Landsat Multispectral Scanner (MSS) data. The project is sponsored by the U.S.EPA Global Change 
Research Program and is being undertaken as a component of the NASA organized Landsat Pathfinder. 
The objective of the NALC project is to produce land cover and land cover change datasets for use in the 
inventory of terrestrial carbon stocks, the modelling of carbon fluxes due to land cover change, and the 
identification of lands suitable for the uptake of carbon through forest growth. A total of 804 
multitemporal (early 1970's, mid-1980's, and early 1990's) georeferenced and coregistered Landsat MSS 
datasets are being assembled by the USGS EROS Data Center for Mexico, Central America, Caribbean 
Island, and the USA. Assembled data sets are available at low cost from EDC. A major effort has been 
undertaken to develop standardized methods for deriving land cover and land cover change. The 
involvement of in-country scientists in the analysis of data is an essential element of the NALC project. 
Agreements for international cooperation in the analysis of the NALC data sets have been initiated with 
Mexico and Canada. Additional arrangements for the analysis of Central American and Caribbean dataset 
will be established in 1994. 
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