EnviroAtlas -- Washington DC -- Meter-Scale Urban Land Cover (MULC) Data (2013-2014)

The Washington DC EnviroAtlas Meter-scale Urban Land Cover (MULC) dataset comprises an area of 5423.43 km2 encompassing the entire area of Washington DC, and portions of the state of Maryland and state of Virginia. These MULC data and maps were derived from 1-m pixel, four-band (red, green, blue, and infrared light) leaf-on aerial photography acquired from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) as well as ancillary data (e.g., Lidar, National Wetlands Inventory [NWI], cropland, land parcels, power lines, building footprints). Eight land cover classes were mapped: Water, Impervious Surfaces, Soil/Barren, Trees/Forest, Grass/Herbaceous, Agriculture, Woody Wetlands and Emergent Wetlands. Wetlands were delineated using the state wide wetlands data from National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) layer updated on October 15, 2018 (https://www.fws.gov/wetlands/Data/State-Downloads.html ). An analysis of 600 completely random and 111 stratified random photo-interpreted land cover reference points yielded a simple overall user's accuracy (MAX) of 85.4% and an overall fuzzy user's accuracy (RIGHT) of 91.5% within the census block group boundary (see confusion matrices below). These data were developed as part of the Chesapeake Bay High-Resolution Land Cover Project, a cooperative agreement between the Chesapeake Conservancy and the National Park Service, funded through an interagency agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Chesapeake Conservancy, under the direction of Margaret Markham, created the initial statewide 1-meter land cover data. EPA added agriculture and wetlands taken from ancillary data sources. See detailed processing steps and workflow below. This dataset was produced by the Chesapeake Conservancy, the National Park Service, and the US EPA to support research and online mapping activities related to EnviroAtlas. EnviroAtlas (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas) allows the user to interact with a web-based, easy-to-use, mapping application to view and analyze multiple ecosystem services for the contiguous United States. The dataset is available as downloadable data (https://edg.epa.gov/data/Public/ORD/EnviroAtlas) or as an EnviroAtlas map service. Additional descriptive information about each attribute in this dataset can be found in its associated EnviroAtlas Fact Sheet (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas/enviroatlas-fact-sheets).