Chesapeake Land Cover

This dataset contains high-resolution aerial imagery from the USDA NAIP program, high-resolution land cover labels from the Chesapeake Conservancy, low-resolution land cover labels from the USGS NLCD 2011 dataset, low-resolution multi-spectral imagery from Landsat 8, and high-resolution building footprint masks from Microsoft Bing, formatted to accelerate machine learning research into land cover mapping. The Chesapeake Conservancy spent over 10 months and $1.3 million creating a consistent six-class land cover dataset covering the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

While the purpose of the mapping effort by the Chesapeake Conservancy was to create land cover data to be used in conservation efforts, the same data can be used to train machine learning models that can be applied over even wider areas.