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

dataset
posted on 2023-11-30, 11:30 authored by Melanie Kammerer, Aaron L. Iverson, Kevin Li, Sarah C. Goslee

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 an integrated land cover map. Our workflow leveraged strengths of the NVC and the CDL to produce detailed rasters comprising both agricultural and natural land-cover classes. We generated these maps 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 these data. 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 our merged product.

Contents:

Spatial data

  1. Attribute table for merged rasters

Technical validation data

  1. Number and proportion of mismatched pixels
  2. Number and proportion of unresolved pixels
  3. Producer's and User's accuracy values and coverage of reference data

    Resources in this dataset:

    • Resource Title: Attribute table for merged rasters.

      File Name: CombinedRasterAttributeTable_CDLNVC.csv

      Resource Description: Raster attribute table for merged raster product. Class names and recommended color map were taken from USDA-NASS Cropland Data Layer and LANDFIRE National Vegetation Classification. Class values are also identical to source data, except classes from the CDL are now negative values to avoid overlapping NVC values.


    • Resource Title: Number and proportion of mismatched pixels.

      File Name: pixel_mismatch_byyear_bycounty.csv

      Resource Description: Number and proportion of pixels that were mismatched between the Cropland Data Layer and National Vegetation Classification, per year from 2012-2021, per county in the conterminous United States.


    • Resource Title: Number and proportion of unresolved pixels.

      File Name: unresolved_conflict_byyear_bycounty.csv

      Resource Description: Number and proportion of unresolved pixels in the final merged rasters, per year from 2012-2021, per county in the conterminous United States. Unresolved pixels are a result of mismatched pixels that we could not resolve based on surrounding agricultural land (no agriculture with 90m radius).


    • Resource Title: Producer's and User's accuracy values and coverage of reference data.

      File Name: accuracy_datacoverage_byyear_bycounty.csv

      Resource Description: Producer's and User's accuracy values and coverage of reference data, per year from 2012-2021, per county in the conterminous United States. We defined coverage of reference data as the proportional area of land cover classes that were included in the reference data published by USDA-NASS and LANDFIRE for the Cropland Data Layer and National Vegetation Classification, respectively. CDL and NVC classes with reference data also had published accuracy statistics.


    • Resource Title: Data Dictionary.

      File Name: Data_Dictionary_RasterMerge.csv

Funding

Agricultural Research Service, 0500-00093-001-00-D

History

Data contact name

Goslee, Sarah

Data contact email

sarah.goslee@usda.gov

Publisher

Ag Data Commons

Intended use

We expect these ready-to-use rasters characterizing agricultural and natural land cover will be widely useful in many sub-fields of environmental research, such as landscape design and land use planning, modelling ecosystem services, and wildlife ecology and management.

Use limitations

We created a new spatial dataset that integrates both agricultural and natural land cover and that can be used by environmental scientists and managers who are interested landscape-scale processes involving both land cover categories. Though we were able to limit additional inaccuracies from artifacts of our geospatial processing, the product we created is still subject to limitations of the source data. Accuracy of CDL is highest in regions dominated by agriculture and lower in states with more developed or semi-natural land cover, particularly mixed-use landscapes (Lark et al., 2021; USDA NASS, 2021a). LANDFIRE vegetation products like the NVC are designed to be used at landscape, regional, or national scales and are likely less accurate for very small spatial extents (LANDFIRE, 2016a). For rare vegetation classes, LANDFIRE does not publish data on agreement between field plots and NVC raster. If projects are targeting small spatial extents or rare vegetation types, we recommend users review our land cover maps and adjust based on local knowledge or additional vegetation surveys.

Temporal Extent Start Date

2012-01-01

Temporal Extent End Date

2021-12-31

Frequency

  • notPlanned

Theme

  • Not specified

Geographic Coverage

{"type":"FeatureCollection","features":[{"geometry":{"type":"Polygon","coordinates":[[[-125.33203125,23.976881235045],[-125.33203125,48.458351882809],[-64.3359375,48.458351882809],[-64.3359375,23.976881235045],[-125.33203125,23.976881235045]]]},"type":"Feature","properties":{}}]}

Geographic location - description

Conterminous United States

ISO Topic Category

  • environment

National Agricultural Library Thesaurus terms

forests; land cover; landscapes; habitats; United States; data collection; cropland; spatial data; land use and land cover maps; vegetation cover; vegetation maps; geospatial data processing; raster data; landscape management; ecosystem services; land use planning; land use

OMB Bureau Code

  • 005:18 - Agricultural Research Service

OMB Program Code

  • 005:040 - National Research

ARS National Program Number

  • 216

Pending citation

  • No

Public Access Level

  • Public

Preferred dataset citation

Kammerer, Melanie; Iverson, Aaron L.; Li, Kevin; Goslee, Sarah C. (2022). Data from: Not just crop or forest: building an integrated land cover map for agricultural and natural areas (tabular files). Ag Data Commons. https://doi.org/10.15482/USDA.ADC/1527977