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USASCII

🇺🇸 🗺️ -> 🔢
An ASCII visualization of land cover in the contiguous U.S. over time.

Setup

Requires Miniconda or Anaconda.

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate nlcd

Data

Land Cover Data - Download annual NLCD CONUS GeoTIFFs from MRLC (Projects = Annual NLCD, Products = Land Cover) and place them in data/nlcd_rasters/. Files are several GB each and not tracked in this repo.

US Boundary - Download a US boundary shapefile for clipping from the Census TIGER site (labeled 'States 1:20,000,000 (national)') and place in data/us_boundary/.

Usage

python USASCII_Script.py

Outputs one PNG per year to data/nlcd_out/.

How it works

  1. Reads each annual NLCD raster
  2. Downsamples 30m → 30km via most common land use
  3. Extracts centroids for each downsampled pixel
  4. Clips to CONUS boundary
  5. Plots each land cover class as an ASCII character

Land cover legend

Class Char
Open Water ~
Developed (Low → High) . ▫ ◻ ⊡
Barren
Deciduous / Evergreen / Mixed Forest + ^ ×
Shrub/Scrub ·
Grassland ,
Pasture/Hay -
Cultivated Crops =
Woody / Herbaceous Wetlands w v