Land - Use and Land - Cover Trends in the Upper Midwest

Land use can be defined as the values that humans obtain from landscapes. What is it that people are actually doing on the landscape? Though remote sensing is often used for mapping land use and land cover over large areas, to actually map land use usually requires some careful human interpretation of the imagery or, better, surveying or interviewing people on the ground to identify their use of land. Land use can change without much visible change in the landscape, though land-use changes often have obvious land-cover effects. Land cover is the biophysical condition of a landscape. It is the sum total of all vegetation, structures, water and other materials that are exposed at the surface. Land cover can be fairly consistently identified with remote sensing. It is possible for land cover to change without changing land use (e.g., as agricultural fields are harvested or clear-cuts regrow to forest).