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Shrubland ecosystems occupy a large portion of the terrestrial surface over the conterminous United States and provide unique ecosystem services that are dependent upon the quality and quantity of this ecosystem. Most shrublands are located in arid and semiarid environments and are vulnerable to external disturbances such as grazing, human development activities, wildland fire, and climate change. The ability to quantify and understand how shrub canopy distribution and density changes modify terrestrial ecosystems and affect environmental conditions - and then ultimately monitor those changes is vital for both land management and scientific research. The USGS, BLM and other Federal partners are collaborating on producing a remote sensing-based quantification of western U.S. shrub lands. Products provide a 30 meter per-pixel canopy estimate of several main shrubland components including all shrub, sagebrush, herbaceous, annual herbaceous, litter, bare ground and shrub height. This approach relies on three major steps including creating training datasets using field measurements and high resolution satellite imagery at selected sites, extrapolating these training datasets to the landscape level using medium resolution satellite images, and validating the final products with independent field measurements. Research has shown this approach quantifies landscape components in such a way as to enable successful monitoring. 2013 products have been developed for Southwest Idaho, Southeast Oregon, Northwest Nevada and Northeast California. 2014 products will include the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin, western Utah and southern Idaho, with other areas planned for subsequent years. Products will be integrated into the National Land Cover Database for future updating and monitoring. Products will also be directly used to support a variety of BLM activities including providing monitoring data for the inter-agency sage grouse initiative and the Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) program.