Corn Belt Topsoil and Economic Loss Estimates from Remote Sensing

Estimates quantify topsoil loss and associated economic losses from decreased crop productivity at county and state levels across the Midwestern U.S. Corn Belt. The dataset includes intermediate 4-meter gridded products like elevation, slope, curvature, soil organic carbon index, and probability of exposed subsoil, derived from analysis of 759 agricultural fields across 28 sites. Data was produced by ORNL_CLOUD using LiDAR-derived DEMs from 2003-2018 and WorldView imagery.

Use Cases

• Estimating county-level economic losses from crop productivity decline due to topsoil erosion.
• Modeling the relationship between topographic curvature and subsoil exposure probability for erosion prediction.
• Mapping soil organic carbon index (SOCI) at a 4-meter resolution across agricultural study sites.
• Upscaling field-level soil loss observations to state-level assessments across a 375,000 km2 region.

Strengths

• Based on detailed analysis of 759 individual agricultural fields totaling 210 km2 of exposed bare soil.
• Includes high-resolution (4m) gridded topographic and soil parameters derived from LiDAR and satellite imagery.
• Provides a scalable method validated across 28 study sites within the 375,000 km2 Corn Belt region.

Limitations

• Key metadata conflicts: last updated date is listed as both 2018-07-31 and 2026-03-12 across sources.
• Specific row counts, dataset size, and complete column lists are not provided by any source.
• License is specified only as 'other-license-specified', requiring further investigation for use.

Provenance

Source

ORNL_CLOUD

Collection Method

Derived from LiDAR-derived digital elevation models (2003-2018) and WorldView satellite imagery analysis of 28 agricultural sites.

Time Range

2003-2018

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:30:19.145683

Geography

Corn Belt region of the Midwestern USA, covering approximately 375,000 square kilometers.