Land Cover 2023

Anne Arundel County, Maryland is interested in monitoring its changing land cover for planning, zoning and environmental protection purposes. The county is under increasing development pressure and needs to maintain an accurate land cover database so it may guide development in a sustainable way from both economic and environmental perspectives. The land cover layer was designed and built as a continuation of hand-digitized layers compiled in the 1990s. The current 2023 layer was completed using primarily automated methods and high-resolution aerial imagery (3 inch resolution, leaf-off), as a comparison for cost and accuracy to the earlier automated and manually-produced datasets. This version was updated in 2023 using 4-band aerial imagery collected in the spring of 2023 by the State of Maryland.