Baseline Land Use Map for the Conterminous United States in Support of the 2020 Resources Planning Act Assessment
| Authors: | Evan B. Brooks, John W. Coulston, David Walker |
| Year: | 2026 |
| Type: | General Technical Report |
| Station: | Southern Research Station |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.2737/SRS-GTR-285 |
| Source: | USDA Forest Service |
Abstract
Projecting land use transitions onto a wall-to-wall raster requires an initial basemap of land use for the projection period. The 2020 Resources Planning Act (RPA) Assessment includes spatial realizations of county-level land use projections; these realizations are a collection of 90-meter resolution rasters that allocate the county-level projections across the conterminous United States (CONUS). The 2020 basemap is a 90-meter raster depicting land use across the CONUS circa 2020 and is used as the starting position for the spatial realizations. The basemap was created by fusing a modified land cover map with a forest land use map, then constraining forest land area to match area estimates per State using the RPA definition of forest. The 2020 basemap rasterizes land use for the starting year of the 2020 RPA Assessment while using the same land use classes as the county-level projections, and its forest land area totals per State are consistent with forest inventory estimates used in other parts of the RPA Assessment. The basemap also showed good agreement on per-State forest area estimates when compared to the 2017 Forest Resources Report. A 2011 basemap was generated using similar methods, providing two points in time for researchers to model dynamic processes.