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EnviroAtlas -- Philadelphia, PA -- Meter-Scale Urban Land Cover Data (MULC) Data (2013)

Published by U.S. EPA Office of Research & Development (ORD) - National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) | U.S. Environmental Protection Agency | Metadata Last Checked: January 27, 2026 | Last Modified: 2018-07-13T00:00:00.000+00:00
The Philadelphia, PA Meter-Scale Urban Land Cover (MULC) dataset comprises 7184 km2 around the city of Philadelphia and surrounding land in parts of fourteen counties within four states (PA, DE, NJ, MD): New Castle County in Delaware and Cecil County Maryland; Bucks, Chester, Lancaster, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and Delaware Counties in Pennsylvania; and Burlington, Mercer, Camden, Gloucester, Salmen and Atlantic Counties in New Jersey. These MULC data and maps were derived from several sources from multiple years: leaf-off LiDAR; 1-m pixel, four-band (red, green, blue, and near-infrared) leaf-on aerial photography acquired from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP); 1-ft pixel orthoimagery; additional leaf-on and leaf-off imagery as well as ancillary vector data (e.g., roads, building footprints.). Ten land cover classes were mapped: Water, Impervious Surfaces, Soil/Barren, Tree/Forested, Shrub, Grass/Herbaceous NonWoody Vegetation, Agriculture, Orchard, and Wetlands (Woody and Emergent). Wetlands were delineated using the best available existing wetlands data, which was a National Wetlands Inventory (NWI) layer. An analysis of 600 completely random and 251 stratified random photo-interpreted land cover reference points yielded a simple overall user's accuracy (MAX) of 78% and an overall fuzzy user's accuracy (RIGHT) of 86% (see confusion matrices below). This dataset was produced by the University of Vermont Spatial Analysis Laboratory, the United States Forest Service Urban Tree Canopy (UTC) assessment program, and the US EPA to support research and online mapping activities related to the EnviroAtlas. EnviroAtlas (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas) allows the user to interact with a web-based, easy-to-use, mapping application to view and analyze multiple ecosystem services for the contiguous United States. The dataset is available as downloadable data (https://edg.epa.gov/data/Public/ORD/EnviroAtlas) or as an EnviroAtlas map service. Additional descriptive information about each attribute in this dataset can be found in its associated EnviroAtlas Fact Sheet (https://www.epa.gov/enviroatlas/enviroatlas-fact-sheets).

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