A Decade of Annual National Land Cover Products - the Cropland Data Layer

The Cropland Data Layer (CDL) is a national land cover product produced by the US Department of Agriculture/National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) to assess planted crop acreage on an annual basis. The 2017 CDL product serves as the decadal anniversary for the mapping of conterminous US agriculture. The CDL is a supervised land cover classification derived from medium resolution Earth observing satellites that capture crop phenology throughout the growing season, leveraging confidentially held ground reference information from the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) as training data. The CDL currently uses ancillary geospatial data from the US Geological Survey's National Land Cover Database (NLCD), and Imperviousness and Forest Canopy layers as well as the National Elevation Dataset as training for the non-agricultural domain. Accuracy assessments are documented and released annually with metadata publication. NASS is currently reprocessing the 2008 and 2009 CDL products to 30m resolution. They were originally processed and released at 56m based on the Resourcesat-1 AWiFS sensor. Additionally, best practices learned from processing the FSA ground reference data were applied to the historical training set, providing an enhanced classification at 30m. The release of these reprocessed products in the fall of 2017, along with the 2017 CDL annual product will be discussed and will complete a decade's worth of annual 30m products. Discussions of change and trend analytics as well as partnerships with key industry stakeholders will be displayed on the evolution and improvements made to this decadal geospatial crop specific land cover product.