From the course: Real-World GIS (2014)

Exploring agriculture with CropScape - ArcGIS Tutorial

From the course: Real-World GIS (2014)

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Exploring agriculture with CropScape

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The final GIS data portal that I'd like to show you is the United States Department of Agriculture's CropScape layer. Notice here that on the left we have our table of contents that's our visualization options. And then on the top we have some different tools, to interact with our map. Here again, we're going to choose a layer, or in this case a boundary layer, that will help us to extract data. We're going to go ahead and pre-define that, although you could use this option right here to define your specific area of interest. This is especially helpful if your area of interest crosses over multiple boundary lines that are statistical boundaries, such as counties or statistical areas that are agricultural statistical areas. Here, we'll go ahead and choose to download by county. I'll click on the little icon with the American flag on it. And now I'll choose to download by county. And in this case I'll choose the state of Iowa, and our county will be Butler. Now choose Submit, and now the process happens where we're taken to that particular county, and now it is selected. So if we extract data right now, we'll extract the county information from Butler county. I'll choose to extract here by downloading. And in this case, the state of Iowa offers data products of crop-scape layers, from 2013 all the way back in time to 2000. In this case I'm just interested in the current 2013 layer, and I'll choose Submit and begin downloading that. Now that I've downloaded that layer and extracted it, let's take a look at it in ArcMap. Since I'm dealing with a different county in a different state, I'll go ahead and reset the map. Now I'll add that Iowa layer. Here I'll add data and navigate to that location. I'll go ahead and build the pyramids as well. Now we have Butler county and the CropScape layer available to us in ArcMap. When I click the Plus in the table of contents you'll see that a majority of the crops that are grown in Butler County, Iowa, are either corn or soybeans. Here or here. If wanted to do an extended analysis, let's say identifying the area of soybeans that are grown in Butler County, Iowa. We could use ArcToolbox to do that. Clicking on the ArcToolbox icon right here launches the ArcToolbox window. Notice here we have a lot of options for analysis. In this case we have a raster layer, and we might do a bunch of spatial analysis options. In this case, maybe we want to reclassify this particular layer. And in this case we might want to identify the specific places that are soy beans and that are not soy beans. This kind of advanced analysis often requires us to have an extension to our GIS. Something like Spatial Analyst. To find the extensions in the ones that are currently on your machine, you can go to Customize at the top here, and go to Extensions. In this case we don't have any extensions available to us to do this particular kind of advanced analysis. If you add on these extensions to the Esri product, you'll be able to expand your options for analysis.

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