East-West Gateway’s November 2021 Map of the Month depicts the newly released 2019 National Land Cover Database (NLCD) map for the St. Louis region. The primary objective of the NLCD is to provide the nation with nationally complete, current, consistent and public domain information on the nation’s land cover.
Land cover information is critical for local, state, and federal managers and officials to assist them with issues such as assessing ecosystem status and health, modeling nutrient and pesticide runoff, understanding spatial patterns of biodiversity, land use planning, deriving landscape pattern metrics, and developing land management policies.
Agricultural uses are the largest land cover types in the East-West Gateway region, covering approximately 36 percent of the land area. That is followed by deciduous forest with approximately 25.3 percent and developed land cover types with approximately 24 percent of the region’s land area.
Access and explore the web map of land cover in the St Louis region.