North American Land Change Monitoring System

North American Land Change Monitoring System
Name	North American Land Change Monitoring System
Established	2005
Jurisdiction	Canada, United States, Mexico

North American Land Change Monitoring System

The North American Land Change Monitoring System is a trilateral initiative for continent-scale land-cover and land-use change observation coordinated among Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It integrates satellite remote sensing, national inventories, and regional science programs to produce consistent change maps used by agencies such as Natural Resources Canada, the United States Geological Survey, and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Mexico). The program links to continental assessments like those produced for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation and supports reporting to international instruments including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Overview

The initiative grew from cooperation under the North American Free Trade Agreement environmental side agreements and was formalized through collaboration among Environment Canada, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Mexico’s Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales. It leverages sensors from satellite missions such as Landsat program, MODIS, and later commercial constellations to create interoperable products aligned with standards used by the Global Land Cover Facility, European Space Agency, and the Group on Earth Observations. Outputs inform continental analyses by organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and national assessments by agencies including Natural Resources Canada and the United States Department of Agriculture.

Objectives and Scope

Primary objectives include producing repeatable, wall-to-wall land-cover change maps across North America, enabling harmonized trend analysis for ecosystems such as the Arctic tundra, Boreal forest, Great Plains, and the Yucatán Peninsula. The scope spans national parks administered by entities like Parks Canada and National Park Service (United States), Indigenous territories such as those represented by the Assembly of First Nations and National Indigenous Congress (Mexico), and transboundary watersheds like the Rio Grande/Río Bravo del Norte basin and the Great Lakes. The system supports reporting to multilateral frameworks including the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation and regional conservation initiatives like the North American Bird Conservation Initiative.

Data Sources and Methodology

Data sources combine optical and radar imagery from programs such as the Landsat program, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2 missions with national cadastral and forest inventory datasets like the Forest Inventory and Analysis program and Mexico’s Inventario Nacional Forestal y de Suelos. Methodologies adapt algorithms described in publications by researchers affiliated with institutions such as University of British Columbia, University of Colorado Boulder, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, employing time-series change detection techniques used by projects like the Global Forest Watch and methods validated against field campaigns coordinated with Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy. Quality assurance follows protocols comparable to those of the International Organization for Standardization and draws on machine learning toolkits developed at labs including NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Products and Applications

Products include annual and decadal land-cover change maps, disturbance layers for forestry and wildfire mapped similarly to datasets used by the Canadian Forest Service and the National Interagency Fire Center, and impervious-surface and urban-expansion layers relevant to planning agencies such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and Mexican municipal governments. Applications range from carbon accounting for United Nations REDD+ processes to biodiversity assessments used by the World Wildlife Fund and habitat-suitability modeling employed by researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The system’s outputs are used in cross-border risk assessments for hazards such as flooding along the Mississippi River and coastal change studies for regions affected by Hurricane Katrina-scale events and the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.

Organizational Structure and Partnerships

Governance is trilateral, with coordination among federal agencies including Natural Resources Canada, the United States Geological Survey, and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. Technical partnerships involve academic centers such as McGill University, University of California, Berkeley, and Texas A&M University, international organizations like the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and NGOs including World Resources Institute and Wildlife Conservation Society. The program interfaces with commercial providers—mirroring collaborations seen with Planet Labs and Maxar Technologies—for access to high-resolution imagery, and aligns with standards from bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Implementation and Operational History

Pilot activities began in the mid-2000s with regional studies comparing national mapping approaches, followed by production of the first continental change products in the 2010s. The effort evolved alongside advances in the Landsat program data policy and the proliferation of free data from the Sentinel program, which enabled annual monitoring and near-real-time disturbance detection similar to services developed by the U.S. Forest Service and Global Forest Watch. Operational milestones include formal trilateral agreements, incorporation into continental reporting for the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, and iterative updates improving classification consistency and accuracy with contributions from research consortia at MIT and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Ongoing work emphasizes capacity building with provincial, state, and municipal partners such as Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and integration with emerging monitoring initiatives like the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation.

Category:Environmental monitoring