This report summarizes discussions from a workshop of users and producers of land-use and land-cover (LULC) scenarios, convened by USGCRP's Scenarios and Interpretive Science Coordinating Group on June 25-27, 2014. The report focuses on needs, resources/capabilities, and barriers/opportunities for producing national-scale, regionally differentiated, and spatially explicit LULC scenarios for the United States. It describes options for agency and interagency activities that would advance this research but makes no recommendations.

Urbanization is an important component of global environment change. Inspite of advances in remote sensing technologies, monitoring urban landscapes at large scales remains a challenging task. This study demonstates a methodology to map urban land expansion at continental-global scale.

As one of the rapidly urbanizing regions of the world, East and Southeast Asia is experiencing high rates of built-up expansion and population growth. The higher rate of growth of urban population compared to urban land has resulted in increased densities of major urban agglomerations. The results of this study contrasts previous sample-based studies, which conclude that cities are universally declining in density.