Annual (1986-2020) land-use/land cover maps of the Santa Cruz Watershed and Tucson metropolitan area, Arizona

Annual (1986-2020) land-use/land cover maps at 30-meter resolution of the Tucson metropolitan area, Arizona and the greater Santa Cruz Watershed including Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. Maps were created using a combination of Landsat imagery, derived transformation and indices, texture analysis and other ancillary data fed to a Random Forest classifier in Google Earth Engine. The maps contain 13 classes based on the National Land Cover Classification scheme and modified to reflect local land cover types. Data are presented as a stacked, multi-band raster with one "band" for each year (Band 1 = 1986, Band 2 = 1987 and so on). Note that the year 2012 was left out of our time series because of lack of quality Landsat data. A color file (.clr) is included that can be imported to match the color of the National Land Cover Classification scheme. This data release also contains two JavaScript files with the Google Earth Engine code developed for pre-processing Landsat imagery and for image classification, and a zip folder "Accuracy Data" with five excel files: 1) Accuracy Statistics describing overall accuracy for each LULC year, 2) Confusion Matrices for each LULC year, 3) Land Cover Evolution - changes in pixel count for each class per year, 4) LULC Change Matrix - to and from class changes over the period, and 5) Variable Importance - results of the Random Forest Classification.