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Full catalog/houston-landcover
houston-landcover·dataset

Houston Land Cover Map

Houston Land Cover
land NASA VEDA COG
In plain English

What it measures. A map of what covers the ground across the Houston metro area, with different colors for land types such as urban areas, water, and vegetation.

How it's made. Made from NASA's MODIS satellite land-cover classification.

How & where you'd use it. Helps planners and researchers understand urban growth and the mix of developed and natural land.

What's measured

houstonlandcover

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2001-01-01 → 2019-01-01
  • Spatial extent-97, 32, -96, 32
  • FormatsCOG

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

MODIS-derived land use-land cover over the Houston metro area (zoomed-in extent). Displays colors 0-255 from a lookup table for land cover type (ex: reds = urbanized).

Get the data

veda_access.py
# NASA VEDA — open STAC API, anonymous (cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs)
from pystac_client import Client

cat = Client.open("https://openveda.cloud/api/stac")
col = cat.get_collection("houston-landcover")
items = list(col.get_items())          # browse the analysis-ready COGs
# open an asset with rioxarray:
# import rioxarray; da = rioxarray.open_rasterio(items[0].assets["cog_default"].href)
NASA VEDA is an open STAC catalog — browse and stream the cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs anonymously (no login).