Forest Cover Loss, 2000-2012, Northeast

This dataset represents forest loss during the period 2000-2012, defined as a stand-replacement disturbance, or a change from a forest to non-forest state, entirely within the study period, for the Northeast region including Canada. Data was encoded as either 1 (loss) or 0 (no loss).

The Global Forest Cover Change project is a multi-year activity designed to generate forest cover and forest cover change products at multiple resolutions and multiple dates for every land surface in the world. The GFCC team is located at the University of Maryland, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the South Dakota State University. This activity is sponsored primarily through the NASA MEaSUREs program, with its emphasis on producing quality data products called Earth Science Data Records (ESDRs).

The Northeast data from the Global Forest Change dataset was acquired as 10x10 degree tiles, consisting of seven files per tile. All files contained unsigned 8-bit values and have a spatial resolution of 1 arc-second per pixel, or approximately 30 meters per pixel at the equator.

The data was then mosaicked and clipped to the Northeast region including the North Atlantic LCC boundary in Canada.The data are results from a time-series analysis of 654,178 Landsat 7 ETM+ images in characterizing global forest extent and change from 2000 through 2012. For additional information about these results, please see the associated journal article: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6160/850 (Hansen et al., Science 2013).