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Data from: Not just crop or forest: building an integrated land cover map for agricultural and natural areas (spatial files)

Metadata Updated: June 5, 2025

Introduction and Rationale:Due to our increasing understanding of the role the surrounding landscape plays in ecological processes, a detailed characterization of land cover, including both agricultural and natural habitats, is ever more important for both researchers and conservation practitioners. Unfortunately, in the United States, different types of land cover data are split across thematic datasets that emphasize agricultural or natural vegetation, but not both. To address this data gap and reduce duplicative efforts in geospatial processing, we merged two major datasets, the LANDFIRE National Vegetation Classification (NVC) and USDA-NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL), to produce integrated ‘Spatial Products for Agriculture and Nature’ (SPAN). Our workflow leveraged strengths of the NVC and the CDL to produce detailed rasters comprising both agricultural and natural land-cover classes. We generated SPAN for each year from 2012-2021 for the conterminous United States, quantified agreement between input layers and accuracy of our merged product, and published the complete workflow necessary to update SPAN. In our validation analyses, we found that approximately 5.5% of NVC agricultural pixels conflicted with the CDL, but we resolved a majority of these conflicts based on surrounding agricultural land, leaving only 0.6% of agricultural pixels unresolved in the final version of SPAN.Contents:Spatial dataNational rasters of land cover in the conterminous United States: 2012-2021Rasters of pixels mismatched between CDL and NVC: 2012-2021Resources in this dataset:Resource Title: SPAN land cover in the conterminous United States: 2012-2021 - SCINet File Name: KammererNationalRasters.zip Resource Description: GeoTIFF rasters showing location of pixels that are mismatched between 2016 NVC and specific year of CDL (2012-2021). Spatial Products for Agriculture and Nature ('SPAN') land cover in the conterminous United States from 2012-2021. This raster dataset is available in GeoTIFF format and was created by joining agricultural classes from the USDA-NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL) to national vegetation from the LANDFIRE National Vegetation Classification v2.0 ('Remap'). Pixels of national vegetation are the same in all rasters provided here and represent land cover in 2016. Agricultural pixels were taken from the CDL in the specified year, so depict agricultural land from 2012-2021. Resource Title: Rasters of pixels mismatched between CDL and NVC: 2012-2021 - SCINet File Name: MismatchedNational.zip Resource Description: GeoTIFF rasters showing location of pixels that are mismatched between 2016 NVC and specific year of CDL (2012-2021). This dataset includes pixels that were classified as agriculture in the NVC but, in the CDL, were not agriculture (or were a conflicting agricultural class). For more details, we refer users to the linked publication describing our geospatial processing and validation workflow.SCINet users: The files can be accessed/retrieved with valid SCINet account at this location: /LTS/ADCdatastorage/NAL/published/node455886/ See the SCINet File Transfer guide for more information on moving large files: https://scinet.usda.gov/guides/data/datatransferGlobus users: The files can also be accessed through Globus by following this data link. The user will need to log in to Globus in order to retrieve this data. User accounts are free of charge with several options for signing on. Instructions for creating an account are on the login page.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: us-pd

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date March 30, 2024
Metadata Updated Date June 5, 2025
Data Update Frequency irregular

Metadata Source

Harvested from USDA JSON

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date March 30, 2024
Metadata Updated Date June 5, 2025
Publisher Agricultural Research Service
Maintainer
Identifier 10.15482/USDA.ADC/1527978
Data Last Modified 2025-05-06
Public Access Level public
Data Update Frequency irregular
Bureau Code 005:18
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 451b5bda-3866-4423-a56d-ad02b97b8ad6
Harvest Source Id d3fafa34-0cb9-48f1-ab1d-5b5fdc783806
Harvest Source Title USDA JSON
License https://www.usa.gov/publicdomain/label/1.0/
Old Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -125.859375, 23.885837699862, -125.859375, 49.38237278701, -65.21484375, 49.38237278701, -65.21484375, 23.885837699862, -125.859375, 23.885837699862}
Program Code 005:040
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 6b8375021aa16330737e229d1e9c9386340abf2dbf9ac67f0a9ac3204e61a38e
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -125.859375, 23.885837699862, -125.859375, 49.38237278701, -65.21484375, 49.38237278701, -65.21484375, 23.885837699862, -125.859375, 23.885837699862}
Temporal 2012-01-01/2021-12-31

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