NLCD_INEGI: Harmonized US-Mexico Land Cover Change Dataset, 1992/2001/2011

We have taken the Uso del Suelo y Vegetacion land cover classification products for Mexico (courtesy of Mexico's Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Geografia, or INEGI) for years 1985, 1993, 2002, 2007, and 2011 (INEGI, 2015); harmonized their classes with the classes of the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) National Land Cover Database (NLCD) (Homer et al., 2015), and merged the two datasets to form a single land cover product covering the continental US and Mexico, for years 1992/3, 2001/2, and 2011. Details of processing, along with the processing scripts, are archived in GitHub in the NLCD_INEGI project (Bohn, 2019).

Output files are ESRI ascii-format raster files, geographic projection, 0.000350884 degree cellsize. Each file contains a 1x1 degree box or "tile", named nlcd_inegi.lat0_lat1n.lon0_lon1w.asc, where lat0 and lat1 are the south and north boundaries of the box and lon0 and lon1 are the west and east boundaries (west = positive).

This project contains the following g-zipped tar files:

• 1992.tgz - land cover from 1992 (NLCD) and 1993 (INEGI)
• 2001.tgz - land cover from 2001 (NLCD) and 2002 (INEGI)
• 2011.tgz - land cover from 2011 (both NLCD and INEGI)
• stable_2001-2011.tgz - land cover from those pixels that had the same class in 2001 and 2011 ("stable" pixels)

On LINUX, the contents of these files can be extracted via "tar":

tar -xvzf 1992.tgz >& log.tar.txt

On Windows, applications such as "7-zip" can extract the contents.

Each of these .tgz files contain a folder with the same name but without the ".tgz". Within each of these folders is a sub-folder called "asc.clip.1deg". This folder contains the 1x1 tiles.