Modeled conterminous United States Crop Cover datasets for 2013

Crop cover maps have become widely used in a range of research applications. Multiple crop cover maps have been developed to suite particular research interests. The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Cropland Data Layers (CDL) are a series of commonly used crop cover maps for the conterminous United States (CONUS) that span from 2008-2013. In this investigation we wanted to expand the temporal coverage of the NASS CDL archive back to 2000 by creating yearly NASS CDL-like crop cover maps derived from a classification tree model algorithm. We used over 11 million crop sample records to train a classification tree algorithm and to develop a crop classification model (CCM). The model was used to create crop cover maps for [...]