The 2010 North American Land Cover 30-meter dataset was produced as part of the North American Land Change Monitoring

System (NALCMS), a trilateral effort between Natural Resources Canada, the United States Geological Survey, and three Mexican

organizations including the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía),

National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of the Biodiversity (Comisión Nacional Para el Conocimiento y Uso de la

Biodiversidad), and the National Forestry Commission of Mexico (Comisión Nacional Forestal). The collaboration is facilitated

by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, an international organization created by the Canada, Mexico, and United States

governments under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation to promote environmental collaboration between the

three countries.

The general objective of NALCMS is to devise, through collective effort, a harmonized multi-scale land cover monitoring

approach which ensures high accuracy and consistency in monitoring land cover changes at the North American scale and

which meets each country’s specific requirements.

This 30-meter dataset of North American Land Cover reflects land cover information for 2010 from Mexico and Canada and 2011

for the United States. Each country developed its own classification method to identify Land Cover classes and then provided

an input layer to produce a continental Land Cover map across North America. Canada, Mexico, and the United States developed

their own 30-meter land cover products; see specific sections on data generation below.

The main inputs for image classification were 30-meter Landsat data. Image selection processes and reduction to specific

spectral bands varied among the countries due to study-site-specific requirements. While Canada selected most images from

the year 2010 with a few from 2009 and 2011, the United States employed mainly images from 2011. Mexico used all available

images from 2010.

In order to generate a seamless and consistent land cover map of North America, national maps were generated for Canada by

the CCRS; for Mexico by CONABIO, INEGI, and CONAFOR; and for the United States by the USGS. Each country chose their own

approaches, ancillary data, and land cover mapping methodologies to create national datasets. This North America dataset

was produced by combining the national land cover datasets.