General-purpose land cover classifications

These are intended to classify land cover at a certain level of detail. An example is the USGS land cover classification (Anderson et al., 1976, United States Department of the Interior - U.S. Geological Survey, 1990). This has three levels: (1) general kind of land use (urban, agricultural, rangeland, forest, water, wetland, barren land, tundra, and perpetual snow & ice), (2) major land use (e.g., residential, cropland). (3) specific kind of land use (e.g., single-family detached dwellings, winter small grains). Each level is appropriate to a particular spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution of the supporting imagery. Here is the Anderson Level 1 & 2 classification:

Land use codes for LUDA data, Levels 1 and 2

1 Urban or Built-up Land 11 Residential 12 Commercial and Services 13 Industrial 14 Transportation, Communication, and Utilities 15 Industrial and Commercial Complexes 16 Mixed Urban or Built-up Land 17 Other Built-up Land 2 Agricultural Land 21 Cropland and Pasture 22 Orchards, Groves, Vineyards, Nurseries, & Ornamental Horticultural Areas 23 Confined Feeding Operations 24 Other Agriculture Land

3 Rangeland 31 Herbaceous Rangeland 32 Shrub and Brush Rangeland 33 Mixed Rangeland 4 Forest Land 41 Deciduous Forest Land 42 Evergreen Forest Land 43 Mixed Forest Land 5 Water 51 Streams and Canals 52 Lakes 53 Reservoirs 54 Bays and Estuaries 6 Wetland 61 Forested Wetlands 62 Non-forested Wetlands

7 Barren Land 71 Dry Salt Flats 72 Beaches 73 Sandy Areas other than Beaches 74 Bare Exposed Rock 75 Strip Mines, Quarries, and Gravel Pits 76 Transitional Areas 77 Mixed Barren Land 8 Tundra 81 Shrub and Brush Tundra 82 Herbaceous Tundra 83 Bare Ground Tundra 84 Wet Tundra 85 Mixed Tundra 9 Perennial Snow or Ice 91 Perennial Snowfields

Notice that this classification would be useless for many purposes, e.g. differentiating small-holders practicing traditional agriculture from market-oriented large farmers. The classification must fit the purposes of the evaluation.

Another example is the ecological classification of Holdridge (1967), widely used in Latin America to distinguish ‘life zones’ that have a well-defined set of possible uses and limitations as well as human ecology.