The USGS is currently developing the National Land Cover Characterization Project (a subproject of the LCCP Land Cover Characterization Project) which will provide a consistent landuse coverage, in terms of resolution and projection. This is gridded/raster landuse data which has been derived via satellite imagery. The data will be stored in a Geo-TIFF format in the Conical Equal Area projection. This landuse data will be greatly superior because of the increased resolution and the more recent (1992) estimations of land use as opposed to the status-quo which uses much older data. The figure below is a landuse image taken from the NLCCP web site.