High-resolution land cover of South Dakota (2014)

This data publication contains 2014 high-resolution land cover data for each of the 66 counties within South Dakota. These data are a digital representation of land cover derived from 1-meter aerial imagery from the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). There is a separate file for each county. Data are intended for use in rural areas and therefore do not include land cover in cities and towns. Land cover classes (tree cover, other land cover, water, or city/town) were mapped using an object-based image analysis approach and supervised classification.
These data are designed for conducting geospatial analyses and for producing cartographic products. In particular, these data are intended to depict the location of tree cover in the county. The mapping procedures were developed specifically for agricultural landscapes that are dominated by annual crops, rangeland, and pasture and where tree cover is often found in narrow configurations, such as windbreaks and riparian corridors. Because much of the tree cover in agricultural areas of the United States occurs in windbreaks and narrow riparian corridors, many geospatial datasets derived from coarser-resolution satellite data (such as Landsat), do not capture these landscape features. This dataset and others in this series are intended to address this particular data gap.
This metadata file contains documentation for the entire set of land cover county files. Individual metadata documents containing detailed information specific (e.g., spatial) to each county are included with the data files.