Climate & Health – Tree Canopy
This indicator reports the percentage of the report area that is covered by tree canopy. Report data is based on analysis of the 2021 National Land Cover Database – Tree Canopy analytical dataset.
Source
Source Description
The Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) consortium is a group of federal agencies who coordinate and generate consistent and relevant land cover information at the national scale for a wide variety of environmental, land management, and modeling applications. The creation of this consortium has resulted in the mapping of the lower 48 United States, Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico into a comprehensive land cover product termed, the National Land Cover Database (NLCD), from decadal Landsat satellite imagery and other supplementary datasets.
Methodology
This indicator reports the percentage of land area covered by tree canopy based on data from the 2021 The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) Percent Tree Canopy Collection. The NLCD tree canopy imagery is a product of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), and is produced through a cooperative project conducted by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium (www.mrlc.gov). This dataset consists of pixel values range from 0 to 100 percent, with each individual value representing the area or proportion of that 30m cell covered by tree canopy.
In order to generate percent tree canopy values for census geographies, the NLCD 2021 Percent Tree Canopy Analytical Dataset was processed using ESRI Zonal Statistics tools. Zones were based on US Census Block Group boundaries. These figures were aggregated and mapped at the census tract and county levels. Census tract and county figures are also available as population weighted percentages based on 2020 American Community Survey 5-year estimates.
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