The 2010 North American Land Cover data set was produced as part of the North  American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS), a trilateral effort between the  Canada Centre for Remote Sensing, the United States Geological Survey, and three  Mexican organizations including the National Institute of Statistics and Geography  (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia), 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. 

 The initial data set of North American Land Cover at 250 meters reflected land  cover information for 2005.  This 2010 data set was produced by updating the 2005  data to show land cover changes as determined from more recent data.  No changes  were mapped in Hawaii because newer data were not available.  Land cover  classification changed between 2005 and 2010 for approximately 1 percent of the  continental area.  For the continental data sets (including surrounding water  fringe) 4150241 pixels (1.03% of the area) changed in the update.   The following  national counts exclude the water fringe: Canada, 3264779 pixels changed (2.05%);  Mexico, 47070 pixels changed (0.15%), and U.S., 836706 pixels changed (0.55%).

 The initial data set used to generate land cover information over North America was  produced by the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing from observations acquired by the  Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS/Terra).  All seven land  spectral bands were processed from Level 1 granules into top-of-atmosphere  reflectance covering North America at a 250-meter spatial and 10-day temporal  resolution.

 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 INEGI, CONABIO,  and CONAFOR; and for the United States by the USGS.  Each country used specific  training data and land cover mapping methodologies to create national data sets.   This North America data set was produced by combining the national land cover  data sets.  

 The countries worked together to produce a definitive list of land cover  classifications for the 2005 data; the same classifications were used for the 2010  data.  This document is available for download from the same site as the data and  is entitled: North American Land Cover Classifications (2005).