Page 184 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS 423 Avery S. et al.

NASS Geospatial applications from the cropland
data layer
Avery Sandborn, Rick Mueller, Claire Boryan, Dave Johnson, Zhengwei Yang,
Lee Ebinger, Arthur Rosales, Patrick Willis, Robert Seffrin, Rachel Jennings,
Matt Deaton, Hubert Hamer*
United States Department of Agriculture/National Agricultural Statistics Service

Abstract
For more than a decade, the United States Department of Agriculture’s
(USDA’s) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has produced the
Cropland Data Layer (CDL), a geospatial crop-specific land cover product
covering the conterminous US. The CDL is increasingly being integrated into
NASS’s programs. An early application was the development of remotely
sensed based crop acreage and yield estimates, which are independent of the
survey estimates. Numerous derivative products have been created from the
CDL. The Cultivated Layer and Crop Frequency Layer identify, respectively,
where and how often a crop is planted. The June Area Survey (JAS) sample is
drawn from the NASS area frame, and the stratification of the frame is now
based on the CDL. Information for imputation of crop type and acreage for
the JAS now comes from the CDL. Most recently, the CDL has been used as a
primary input into disaster assessments. Now it is being considered as the
foundation for integrating the diverse data sources available to NASS. This
paper will discuss the creation and uses of the CDL and its derivative products
and then focus on their potential future uses within the Agency.

Keywords
CropScape; Cropland Data Layer; Cultivated Layer; June Area Survey; Disaster
Assessments, Data Integration

1. Introduction
The mission of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is to provide timely, accurate,
and useful statistics in service to U.S. agriculture. To help achieve NASS’s
mission, the Cropland Data Layer (CDL) utilizes remote sensing techniques to
provide operational in-season acreage estimates to the NASS Agricultural
Statistics Board and Regional Field Offices. The CDL is a 30-meter national
raster, geo-referenced, crop-specific land cover classification product
produced annually by NASS (Figure 1). The CDLs are published on the NASS
CropScape web application (USDA/NASS Cropland Data Layer 2018).
CropScape is designed to provide the public with open access to serve the
CDL with interactive visualizations, data dissemination, geospatial queries, and

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