Landscape Change Monitoring System (LCMS) Science Team

With the help of regional and national forest staffs we have identified many applications of Landscape Change Monitoring System data, including forest planning and revision, updating existing vegetation maps, assessing landscape conditions, supporting post-fire recovery, and meeting some broad-scale monitoring requirements.

Photo Credit

Landscape Change Monitoring System Production Staff

Animation of Landscape Change Monitoring System Change in Northern

The Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (FIA) is the nation’s forest inventory. One of the Forest Inventory and Analysis Program's current goals is to improve the precision of statistical estimates over relatively small areas, and a primary strategy toward this goal is the use of maps to reduce variances. Unlike other national land cover maps, Landscape Change Monitoring System differentiates forestland use from tree cover, a critical distinction when it comes to improving the precision of Forest Inventory and Analysis’s estimates of forestland. Housman et al (2026) shows that using Landscape Change Monitoring System Land Use maps for fine-scale estimates of forestland area improves precision in a way that is equivalent to tripling the number of field plots, a savings of tens of millions of dollars.  

Researchers with the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources used Landscape Change Monitoring System vegetation loss data as an ancillary data layer to help identify managed pine plantations throughout the state of Missouri. By focusing on the footprint of year-over-year forest disturbance captured by the Landscape Change Monitoring System, they were able to efficiently locate and verify pine plantations, providing the critical training data needed for a high-resolution machine learning model to distinguish managed plantations from natural ecological systems.

Landscape Change Monitoring System map products are recreated and updated every year after the most recent growing season, keeping the time series current and consistently available each year for monitoring land cover, land use, and change. New in v2024-10 (released 2025):

• The Change product is now available as 15 Cause of Change Classes. The final Change classes are created through post-processing with extensive ancillary datasets to categorize the modeled Change classes (Fast Loss, Slow Loss, and Gain).  
• The ability to view the products and their accuracies at different levels of class binning, allowing the user to balance their need for thematic detail and accuracy.
• Landscape Change Monitoring System data for all of Alaska (previously only available for southeast Alaska).

In the coming release cycle, users can expect the next annual updates for the main study areas, typically delivered in late spring for CONUS and Alaska, with Puerto Rico/USVI and Hawaii following later in the summer, supporting ongoing applications like post-fire recovery tracking, vegetation map updates, and broad-scale monitoring.