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Growing demands for temporally-specific land cover and land change are fueling a new generation of maps and statistics that can contribute to understanding geographic and temporal patterns across large regions, provide input into a wide range of environmental modeling studies, clarify the drivers of change, and provide more timely information for land managers. To meet these needs, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) is implementing a new land cover and land change mapping and monitoring capability titled LCMAP - Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection. LCMAP enables the nationwide continuous tracking and characterization of changes in land cover and condition that feeds into assessments of current and historical processes of change. The LCMAP land cover mapping and land change monitoring goals are to create a suite of annual land cover and land change maps and statistics, provide a capability to detect and characterize historical land change at any point from the 1985-present Landsat record, and enable the detection of land change in near real-time (i.e., change detection within two weeks to a month of a change event). This new generation of integrated land change and land cover data are based on the Continuous Change Detection and Classification algorithm developed by Zhu and Woodcock (2014) and a time-series of satellite imagery consisting of all available cloud- and shadow-free pixels in the USGS Landsat Analysis Ready Data archive. Several iterations of development and testing of the system have occurred in which multiple annual land cover and land change products were generated and evaluated over diverse areas across the U.S. Early results indicate that prototype change and land cover products provide land change information that is complex, multifaceted, and complementary. Examples will illustrate the temporal, geographic, and algorithmic challenges as well as the steps we are taking to develop and validate 1985-2017 science-quality annual U.S. land cover and land change products (LCMAP Version 1). The underlying approach and resulting data sets provide a rich range of land change information. LCMAP Version 1 is on a track for completing operational production and dissemination in 2019.

Jesslyn Brown is a research geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey's Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA. Since finishing her graduate program at the University of Nebraska --Lincoln in 1990, she has worked in applied geographic research at the EROS Center. Jess's main interests involve improving our understanding of changes in terrestrial vegetation related to climate and other driving forces and advancing the use of remotely sensed imagery for applications including drought early warning, tracking vegetation phenology (i.e., seasonal dynamics), and mapping land cover and land use. Jesslyn was a member of the Global Land Cover Characteristics team that created the first map of global land cover at a 1 km resolution in the 1990s. From 2001 to 2017, she led multiple projects mainly focused on developing new monitoring tools to improve agricultural drought monitoring capabilities in the U.S., in a strong collaboration with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's National Drought Mitigation Center. During that time, she also led efforts to investigate recent land use change specifically focused on irrigated agriculture across the country. Since 2017, she has led the Land Change Monitoring Assessment and Projection (LCMAP) team. LCMAP is now being implemented by EROS as an end-to-end capability that uses the rich Landsat record to continuously track and characterize changes in land cover and condition and translate such information into assessments of current and historical processes of cover and change.