Cropland Data Layer summaries for NHDPlus Version 2.1 Reach Catchments in the Conterminous United States, 2000-2022

This dataset contains summary tables of land cover from the Cropland Data Layer (CDL) for individual stream catchments of the conterminous United States from the National Hydrography Dataset Plus Version 2.1 (United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service, 2024; McKay and others, 2012). These data were summarized from primarily 30 meter grid cell raster data for the years 2000 through 2022. This data release contains 23 parquet tables that can be linked to the NHD Plus v2 dataset using the COMID unique identifier and a column for each CDL land cover class. From 2008 onwards, these data are available for the conterminous United States. From 2000 to 2007, the CDL is only available for select states. For convenience, an additional parquet table is included with a column for COMID and columns containing a flag indicating whether CDL data exist for each year from 2000 through 2022.
Parquet tables can be accessed using the "arrow" package in RStudio. An example command to open a file is: arrow::read_parquet(filepath, "cdl_2000_table.parquet"))
Data files in this data release are as follows:

file name
description

cdl_data_release.xml
detailed metadata file

cdl_XXXX_table.parquet
summarized cropland data layer, where XXXX indicates the year

cdl_datacheck.parquet
data check table indicating whether CDL data exists for a COMID and year combination

cdl_data_dictionary.txt
data dictionary of cropland data layer categorization codes and land covers