These global land cover layers are the product of a collaboration between USGS and the University of Maryland, Department of Geographical Sciences. Thirty meter resolution raster data layers for circa 2010 tree cover and bare ground and a persistent surface water layer 2000-2012, have been derived from Landsat 7 ETM+ data. The tree cover and bare ground data are per pixel estimates, 1 to 100% (given as integers values 1-100), the water layer is a thematic layer (2 = water).

USGS has produced a set of thematic classifications of very high resolution commercial remote sensing data for a 500 site global sample. The four primary classes (Tree, Water, Barren and Other Vegetation) relate to the themes of the 30 m global land cover described above.

Global Land Cover Viewer