Making Cropland Data Layer Data Accessible and Actionable in GIS Education

The Cropland Data Layer (CDL) product provides categorized land-cover information encompassing the whole contiguous United States. Using the latest Web and geospatial interoperability technologies, CropScape was built to visualize, query, disseminate, and analyze historical and current CDL data interactively and intuitively over the Internet. CropScape can be utilized as a useful online mapping educational tool and an important source of free geospatial data and geospatial Web services in GIS education. This article introduces the CDL product and functions of CropScape, and presents several specific examples of cropland exploring, thematic map creation, natural disaster assessment, crop planting patterns discovery, geospatial data mashup, and geospatial Web application development to demonstrate CropScape's capabilities.