Spatially-explicit land-cover scenarios of federal lands in the northern Great Basin: 2018-2050

As part of a 2018 Northwest Climate Adaptation and Science Center project, USGS researchers are releasing a series of spatially-explicit land-cover projections for the period 2018-2050 covering part of the northern Great Basin (Beaty Butte Herd Management Area, Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge, and Sheldon National Refuge). The dataset contains an empirically-based business-as-usual (BAU) and an RCP8.5 climate change scenario executed for shrub, herbaceous, and bare cover types. Each scenario is executed 30 times (i.e. Monte Carlo simulations) to account for variability across historical change estimates derived from annual fractional cover maps generated by the National Land Cover Database. The map dates are 2018, 2019, 2023, 2028, 2033, 2038, 2043, 2048, and 2050. The resulting state class maps have a 300-meter resolution, and each pixel value describes the fractional cover for the modeled cover type (percent from 0-100%). The maps for each scenario are labeled accordingly: “sc” for state class, “it” for iteration (followed by iteration number), “ts” for time step (followed by simulated year). The downloadable files are organized by cover type and scenario and are available in the GeoTIF (.tif) raster file format. The 1,620 TIF raster data files were created using free state-and-transition software created by ApexRMS.