Cooperative Agreement for affiliated Partner with the Great Lakes Northern Forrest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit

The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research in improving accuracy assessment and area estimation for use in annual remote-sensing based land-cover monitoring. The Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center is a remotely sensed data management, systems development, and science center for the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Land Imaging Program. The USGS EROS has long been at the forefront of land cover research at local to global geographies. The USGS is modernizing its land cover monitoring capabilities and is enabling artificial intelligence, machine learning, and modeling for the detection of land change and the characterization of land cover at any time in the Landsat satellite record.  The USGS is offering a funding opportunity to a CESU partner for research centered on improvements in land cover research by focusing on investigating and implementing state-of-the-art sampling and statistical strategies for accuracy assessment and area estimation, and the impacts of reference data uncertainties. This will be critical for characterizing the validity of USGS land cover change products such as the Annual National Land Cover Database (NLCD) which is used by other federal agencies, agencies of State, tribal, and local governments, institutes of higher education, and the private sector.