Changes in Earth's forest cover impact cycles of water, energy, carbon, and other nutrients, as well as the ability of ecosystems to support biodiversity and human economies. Knowledge of these processes is critical to understand the rates, causes, and consequences of land use change and ultimately, to manage ecosystems sustainably. A number of national and international programs call for routine monitoring of global forest changes, including the Global Observation for Forest and Land Cover Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD), Global Climate Observing System (GCOS, 2004), and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP, 1999). An examination of the societal benefits defined by the Group on Earth Observations and the Strategic US Integrated Earth Observation System reveals that resolutions to all of these issues are dependent on regular and reliable land cover change monitoring. To meet this need, NASA's MEaSURES project, Earth Science Data Records of Global Forest Cover Change, has developed global foreset cover change (FCC) records at 30m spatial resolution. The products are based on the Landsat Global Land Survey collection, which were compiled for years circa 1975, 1990, 2000 and 2005. Therefore, the final output will provide the first and only consistent, global record of forest cover changes documenting the past 35 years and enable the first comprehensive assessments of Earth's forest cover at a scale appropriate to anthropogenic changes.