The National Land Cover Database (NLCD) serves as the definitive Landsat-based, 30-meter resolution, land cover database for the Nation. NLCD provides spatial reference and descriptive data for characteristics of the land surface such as thematic class (for example, urban, agriculture, and forest), percent impervious surface, and percent tree canopy cover. NLCD supports a wide variety of Federal, State, local, and nongovernmental applications that seek to assess ecosystem status and health, understand the spatial patterns of biodiversity, predict effects of climate change, and develop land management policy. NLCD products are created by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics (MRLC) Consortium, a partnership of Federal agencies led by the U.S. Geological Survey.
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This layer displays percent of population living in urban areas as of 2020. Urban areas are identified using population density, count, and size thresholds. This data was released as part of the decennial census in April 2020. Learn more about this dataset at Census.gov.
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The USDA, Economic Research Service’s (ERS) Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes are a classification scheme allowing for flexible, census tract delineation of rural and urban areas throughout the United States and its territories. RUCA codes were designed to address a major limitation associated with county-based classifications; they are often too large to accurately delineate boundaries between rural and urban areas. The more geographically-detailed information provided by RUCA codes can be used to improve rural research and policy—such as addressing concerns that remote, rural communities in large metropolitan counties are not eligible for some rural assistance programs.
The RUCA codes consist of two levels. The primary RUCA codes establish urban cores and the census tracts that are the most economically integrated with those cores through commuting. The secondary RUCA codes indicate whether a census tract has a strong secondary connection (through commuting) to an even larger urban core. For more information, visit the “RUCA website” here.
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