Dr. Tom Loveland is a research geographer at EROS and Director of the USGS Land Cover Institute. He is also Co-Director of the Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence at South Dakota State University. He has been engaged in research on the use of remote sensing for land use and land cover investigations for over 25 years and has conducted studies that have spanned local to global scales. He was among the first to create continental and global-scale land cover data sets derived from remotely sensed imagery. He currently leads a USGS research team that is developing a contemporary land cover history of the United States. In addition, Dr. Loveland is leading the Landsat Continuity Mission Science Team and is a member of the NASA National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project science team.