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

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 data
National 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 - SCINetFile Name: KammererNationalRasters.zipResource 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 - SCINetFile Name: MismatchedNational.zipResource 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.