Viscover is a R shiny app tool designed for interacting with the Cropland Data Layer (CDL) and Soil Data Layer (SDL). The CDL is geo-referenced crop-specific land cover data, created annually for the contiguous United States since 2008. The SDL contains tabular and spatial soil information available for the United States and its Territories. Unlike the official tools on the USDA website, this app allows users to overlay and cross-reference public Federal data from different sources within a single, user-friendly interface. Besides R packages ‘Leaflet’ and ‘Plotly,’ this app mainly relies on the R package ‘Viscover’ developed by Xiaodan Lyu while working as a CSSM Research Assistant. Viscover is accessible from GitHub. It queries the above two public databases with Web Map Service and Web Geo-processing Service. This app can be adapted to visualize other Federal data where web services are supported with good documentation, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Vegetation Condition Index (VCI), National Land Cover Data (NLCD), etc.
