National Land Cover Database, June 2019

East-West Gateway’s June 2019 Map of the Month presents the newly released 2016 National Land Cover Database 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% of the land area. That is followed by developed land with approximately 23% and deciduous forest covering just over 21% of the region’s land area.