Texas Land Cover Screening Map

How to read the results

Land cover (NLCD)

The National Land Cover Database sorts every 30 m square of the country into one of 16 classes from satellite imagery — water, four developed classes, barren land, three forest types, shrub, grassland, pasture, crops and two wetland types. It shows what covers the ground, not how the land is zoned, owned or planned.

Developed classes (21–24)

The four developed classes are set by impervious surface: Open Space under 20%, Low Intensity 20–49%, Medium Intensity 50–79% and High Intensity 80–100%.

Impervious surface (%)

The share of each pixel covered by roofs, pavement and other built surfaces, from 0 to 100%. For a boundary, the tool averages it over the pixels inside, weighted by area.

Pixels and small sites

A point result is the value of the one pixel that contains it. A boundary result counts the pixels whose center is inside the boundary and scales the areas to the boundary's exact area; any part with no NLCD value, offshore or outside the U.S., is listed separately. Small sites rest on few pixels, so check them on current aerial imagery.

Data year

The layers are Annual NLCD 2025, the most recent year USGS has released. Areas built or cleared since then are not shown.

Boundary results

For an uploaded or drawn boundary, the tool reports acres, percent and pixel count by class, the developed share and the area-weighted impervious percent. You can copy the table into a spreadsheet or a curve-number worksheet. The tool does not assign curve numbers or runoff coefficients.

Download data

For a boundary, Class table (CSV) is the class table, and the two GeoTIFFs hold the land cover class and the impervious percent of each pixel whose center is inside the boundary, on this tool’s WGS 84 grid (NLCD resampled from the USGS 30 m grid; empty cells are 255). For analysis at the source resolution, use the USGS data from MRLC. The files are made in your browser; each one states its source and that it is a screening.