Data are intended for use in rural areas and therefore do not include land cover in cities and towns. Land cover classes (tree cover, other land cover, or water) were mapped using an object-based image analysis approach and supervised classification. These data are designed for conducting geospatial analyses and for producing cartographic products. In particular, these data are intended to depict the location of tree cover in the county. The mapping procedures were developed specifically for agricultural landscapes that are dominated by annual crops, rangeland, and pasture and where tree cover is often found in narrow configurations, such as windbreaks and riparian corridors. Because much of the tree cover in agricultural areas of the United States occurs in windbreaks and narrow riparian corridors, many geospatial datasets derived from coarser-resolution satellite data (such as Landsat), do not capture these landscape features. This dataset is intended to address this particular data gap. These data can be downloaded by county at the Forest Service Research Data Archive. Nebraska: https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/catalog/RDS-2019-0038 South Dakota: https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/catalog/RDS-2022-0068 North Dakota: https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/catalog/RDS-2022-0067 A Kansas dataset was also developed using the same methods and is located at: Kansas data download: https://www.fs.usda.gov/rds/archive/catalog/RDS-2019-0052 Kansas map service: https://data-usfs.hub.arcgis.com/documents/high-resolution-tree-cover-of-kansas-2015-map-service/explore

The map of low-density juniper was generated using a random forests model that predicted the probability of low-density juniper (cover < 15%) as a function of seed source distance, see source density, climate, topography, and land use. The final model had an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.884. When low-density juniper was predicted using a probability cutoff of 0.38, the resulting classification had a sensitivity of 0.71 and a specificity of 0.88.The low-density juniper probability map is stored as the GeoTIFF file "juniper_prob_masked.tif". The classified map based on a probability cutoff of 0.38 is stored as the GeoTIFF file "juniper_lowdens_masked.tif". The dataset has a raster cell size of 30 m and is in the UTM projection, zone 14N.

The juniper distribution map was generated from two Landsat 8 scenes collected from path/row 29/30 on 07JAN2015 and from path/row 30/30 on 01JAN2016. Both scenes had >95% snow cover. Matched filtering, a partial unmixing technique, was used to calculated juniper fractions based on a set of endmember pixels, and a threshold was applied to create the classified map. Classification accuracy was 91% for path/row 29/30 and 88% for path/row 30/30. The juniper map is stored as the GeoTIFF file "Juniper_Map_Final.tif". The dataset has a raster cell size of 30 m and is in the UTM projection, zone 14N.