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If you travel across Earth, you’ll experience vastly different landscapes, from forests to plains to wetlands to tundra. You’ll also find humans shaping these different terrains for uses such as bustling urban infrastructure, agriculture, and natural conservation efforts. NASA’s Earth-observing satellites offer a bird’s eye view of all types of land cover and the uses humans make of Earth’s surface.

Some land uses can cause risks to communities and the environment, such as heat islands in urban areas, poor air quality from emissions, and disruption of natural wildlife habitats. Satellite images track these risks and provide insight into how terrain evolves over time. While images taken from orbit cannot always tell the intended use of a piece of land on their own, NASA also curates archives of socioeconomic data, providing a comprehensive picture of how humans are managing Earth’s land masses.

Our data products useful to the study of land cover and land use include maps of croplands and urban areas, land cover classification surveys, and development threat indexes. Some datasets cover a specific region, while others cover the entire land mass of Earth. This information helps researchers and policymakers tackle challenges related to land cover and land use in an all-encompassing, data-driven way. 

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Access a range of datasets and data tools to further your land use/land cover research.

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Access a range of webinars, tutorials, data recipes, and data stories to enhance your knowledge of Earth Observation data.
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Advancing Ecological Insights with NASA Subsetting and Visualization Tools and Services for Site-based Research
Watch this webinar to learn more about datasets and tools that enable the harmonization of remote sensing and in situ ecological data products for site-based research.
This is an image of the World Islands in Dubai.
NASA and IBM Openly Release Geospatial AI Foundation Model for NASA Earth Observation Data
Based on NASA's Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) data, the artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model is a milestone in the application of AI for Earth science.
Discover and Visualize Land Use/Land Cover Data
NASA data help us understand Earth's changing systems in more detail than ever before, and visualizations bring these data to life, making Earth science concepts accessible, beautiful, and impactful.
Data visualization is a powerful tool for analysis, trend and pattern recognition, and communication. Our resources help you find world-class data visualizations to complement and enhance your research. We also have tools and tutorials to help you translate land use/ land cover data into compelling visuals.
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This map combines a color image of Lahaina, Maui with different colored dots to show the development of a fire that burned there Aug. 8-10, 2023.. Each dot marks a spot where a fire was detected. Dots are colored orange, yellow, green, blue or pink corresponding to when the fires were detected.
This map of the Lahaina, Maui fire that burned Aug. 8-10, 2023 is created by combining Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) fire detection data with PlanetScope imagery and applying an artificial intelligence algorithm. Colored circles on the map indicate specific days on which fires were detected; red areas near and around the circles indicate burned areas. Credit: MSU CGCEO.

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