High-resolution urban land cover of Kansas (2015)

This data publication contains 2015 high-resolution land cover data for each of the 669 communities within Kansas. These data are a digital representation of land cover derived from 1-meter aerial imagery from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). There is a separate file for each community. Data are intended for use in cities and towns. Land cover classes (tree cover, other vegetation, bare land, built-up land, and water) were mapped using an object-based image analysis approach and supervised classification.
These data are designed for conducting geospatial analyses and for producing cartographic products. In particular, these data are intended to depict the location of tree cover in communities of all sizes. The mapping procedures were developed specifically for built-up landscapes that are dominated by urban and suburban development where tree cover is often found in small and/or narrow configurations, such as along streets and streams or rivers, or in scattered clusters in yards and parks. Because much of the tree cover in urban and suburban areas of the United States occurs as individual crowns or in small clusters or narrow configurations, many geospatial datasets derived from coarser-resolution satellite data (such as Landsat), do not capture these landscape features. This dataset and others in this series are intended to address this particular data gap.
This metadata file contains documentation for the entire set of community land cover files. Individual metadata documents containing detailed information specific (e.g. spatial) to each community are included with the data files. Land cover data for 245 of 669 communities within Kansas were originally published on 12/03/2019. On 02/24/2021 we added data for an additional 200 communities, and a few minor updates were included for the following previously published communities: Abbyville, Ada, Admire, and Agenda. On 02/17/2022 we added data for the remaining 224 communities, and a few minor updates (explained in more detail in the process steps section below) were included for the following previously published communities: Elkhart, Great Bend, Hepler, Lawrence, Leawood, Lenexa, Linn Valley, Logan, and Longton.