15The U.S. Geological Survey's Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) initiative 16 is a new end-to-end capability to continuously track and characterize changes in land cover, use, and 17 condition to better support research and applications relevant to resource management and environmental 18 change. Among the LCMAP product suite, there are annual land cover maps that will be available to the 19 public. This paper describes an approach to optimize the selection of training and auxiliary data for 20 deriving the thematic land cover maps based on all available clear observations from Landsats 4-8. land cover classification, Landsat 40 community, data needs are changing and innovative products and mapping approaches to characterize 47 land cover are required to meet the community's appetite for science-quality, geospatial land cover data. 48The emergence of land change science has had a particularly significant influence on land cover mapping 49 and monitoring requirements. Driven by concerns about climate change and resource sustainability, 50 Rindfuss et al. (2004) and Turner et al. (2007) defined land change science as a framework to understand 51the interactions between people and nature that lead to changes in the type, magnitude, condition, and 52 location of land use and cover. Implicit is the need to use remote sensing, modeling, and synthesis to 53 understand and explain land change rates, causes, and consequences. Meeting the diverse needs of land 54 cover data users means that the data producers must transform traditional approaches into new strategies 55 that generate higher quality products with additional land cover variables, more detailed legends, and 56 more frequent geospatial information and statistics on change. 57The USGS response to the growing requirements for land use, cover, and condition data, information, and 58 knowledge is the Land Change Monitoring, Assessment, and Projection (LCMAP) initiative. LCMAP is 59 an end-to-end capability to continuously track and characterize changes in land cover, use, and condition 60 and translate such information into assessments of current and historical processes of cover and change 61 that can serve as the science foundation for research and applications relevant to resource management 62 and environmental change. As implied in the name, key elements include mapping and monitoring 63 change, analyzing and assessing the rates, causes, and consequences of change, and providing scenario-64 based projections of future land change. LCMAP continues the long-standing USGS commitment to land 65 cover research and development and represents the foundation for a Landsat-based Federal land 66 monitoring system. Furthermore, LCMAP will stimulate geographic research on understanding the 67 connections between human activity and natural systems, and ultimately represents an essential step 68 towards better understanding the combined impacts of climate and land use and land cover change. 69
