Coastal Services Center

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Hawaii Land Cover

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Seventy million years of volcanic activity created the landform known as the Hawaiian Islands. Stretching over 1,600 miles in the center of the North Pacific Ocean, the relative isolation in which these eight islands evolved produced a unique environment. This project examined the land cover of the main eight Hawaiian Islands.

Remote sensing represents the best means of capturing and documenting land cover. For this project, the NOAA Coastal Services Center created the first comprehensive baseline land cover map for the Hawaiian Islands. A sample map is given below.

The Maui Example

The map below shows an unclassified cloud-reduced image mosaic of the island of Maui. Multiple Landsat scenes spanning seven dates and three years were used in the creation of this image.

The above image is a cloud-reduced image mosaic of the Island of Maui, Hawaii.

This is an image of the Coastal Change Analysis Program's classified land cover of the Island of Maui, Hawaii.

The legend below lists C-CAP's land cover legend categories for the island of Maui, Hawaii. Click each legend box below to see representative examples of the land cover classes as they exist in the Hawaiian Islands.

	High Intensity Developed		Scrub/Shrub
	Low Intensity Developed		Palustrine Emergent Wetland
	Cultivated Land		Unconsolidated Shoreline
	Grassland		Bare Land
	Evergreen Forest		Water

Project Data

Period

2000

Description

Baseline digital land-cover data for the main eight islands of Hawaii (Hawaii, Kauai, Niihau, Molokai, Lanai, Kahoolawe, Oahu, and Maui) were developed from Landsat ETM satellite imagery.

A descriptive summary of this data set is available in Portable Document Format (PDF). The summary includes a report of the dominant land covers and a tabular summary of the seven Hawaii land cover data sets.

View or download the Descriptive Summary (approximately 0.90 megabytes).

The freely available Adobe Acrobat® Reader® is needed to view and print PDF files.

Download data

• Download Kauai 2000 Land Cover Data 0.26 megabytes
• Download Lanai 2000 Land Cover Data 0.09 megabytes
• Download Molokai 2000 Land Cover Data 0.14 megabytes
• Download Niihau 2000 Land Cover Data 0.04 megabytes
• Download Oahu 2000 Land Cover Data 0.38 megabytes
• Download Hawaii 2001 Land Cover Data 1.40 megabytes
• Download Maui and Kahoolawe 2001 Land Cover Data 0.35 megabytes

Complete information about the data-processing procedures can be found in the metadata file that accompanies the downloaded data.

This project was accomplished through the assistance of the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, the Hawaii Coastal Zone Management Program, other agencies associated with the Hawaii Gap Analysis Program (U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, University of Hawaii, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, The Nature Conservancy of Hawaii, Hawaii Natural Heritage Program), and the U.S. Geological Survey EROS Data Center.

Go to the Regional Data Page

Go to the Land Cover Analysis Home Page