Latest NewsOperational Roads was introduced in LF 2020 and was intended to support and provide access for operations and firefighting. This product includes all pixels from the four roads classes within the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2019 Developed Imperviousness Descriptor product for the Conterminous United States (CONUS). The NLCD 2019 roads layer was favorably compared to (and incorporates) other major federal road layers such as the HERE data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS, 2020).
More recent data sets were used to define changes in locations to roads in developing LF 2020. The operational roads layer includes all NLCD 2019 roads, plus all pixels of primary (Value 20), secondary (Value 21), tertiary (Value 22), and thinned (Value 23) roads. This should address the need to provide this information for operations purposes on large fires or incidents, allowing this information to quickly be “burned in” on top of other geospatial operations data. For the Operational Roads product, value 255 indicates NoData.
Operational Roads in Alaska involved combining NLCD 2016 Urban Descriptor for Alaska and HERE roads by buffering the HERE roads by 15m, rasterizing them, and adding them to the NLCD roads. Where NLCD and HERE roads overlapped, NLCD was used. HERE classes were translated to NLCD primary, secondary, tertiary, and thinned roads based on the descriptions, whether it was paved, and speed categories.
Operational Roads in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam were derived from the 2017 US Census Bureau TIGER lines (US Census Bureau, 2017) and include pixels within 15m of the road lines. The lines were buffered by 15m and then converted to raster using the "recode" field to designate the new pixel values.
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Attribute Data Dictionary 
Comma separated value (CSV) files can be found in the LF Library.
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