Land Use and Land Cover (LULC)

This collection includes a global development threat index, a mangrove land cover data set derived from Landsat imagery, a global grid describing the probability of each grid cell becoming urban by 2030, and a data set of Central American vegetation and land cover types based on Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery. The Development Threat Index data set is a global terrestrial development threat map produced by aggregating individual habitat threats such as agricultural expansion, urban expansion, mining, and energy (oil and gas, coal, biofuels, solar, and wind) development. The mangrove map was developed by Chandra Giri and colleagues and represents a baseline of circa year 2000 mangrove distribution.  Researchers at Yale and Texas A&M Universities, produced the global urban expansion grid, which is useful for understanding potential future areas of urban growth and losses of farm or natural lands. The Central American land cover mapping project assessed the degree to which both existing and proposed terrestrial protected area networks protect/would protect landscape-level biodiversity, which are represented as vegetation types delineated from remotely-sensed imagery.