How to download large subsets of USDA NAIP imagery from Box.com?

Question

The US Department of Agriculture’s Geospatial Data Gateway states, ‘As of April 21, 2017 the NAIP datasets are only available through the "NAIP Download" option on the home page and are no longer be available through the Gateway ordering process.’ NAIP (the National Agricultural Imagery Program) is a dataset of satellite imagery of the continental US, and the link they provide lands me on this Box.com shared link.

Box.com limits downloads to 15 GB, so the only way I can download all of 2017 North Dakota data is to manually download files one-by-one, or select a few of them that are hopefully less than 15 GB and download as several batches.

I’ve asked on Box’s help forum and thought to also ask the GIS gurus here: is there any way to automatically download this data, either through Box or some other way?

Non-solutions I've tried:

• WebDAV doesn't follow shared links that I save in my Box.com (I signed up as a free user).
• FTP is not available for free users.
• The Box REST API doesn't recognize folder_ids that I get from the URL (i.e., at the list of 2017 data, the folder for nd or North Dakota is 43484391906, but 43484391906 is not a valid folder_id according to the API).
• Disabling JavaScript gives a list of files and directories but no download link works (looks like Box.com is only usable by JavaScript-enabled clients).
• This makes me wonder if using the Box CLI will also turn out to be a non-solution in getting this data automatically.

Is it possible that the data is not accessible through the REST API because it's hosted on an on-premise appliance? (The nrcs.app prefix in the URLs makes me think this.)

Answer 1

I would encourage you to order state-wide NAIP datasets directly from the USDA FSA Aerial Photography field Office.

FSA requires a small fee (usually $150 to $175 per state for ~0.5TB), although this includes an external hard drive supplied by FSA. You can request either digital ortho quarter quad tiles (DOQQs) or compressed county mosaics (CCM).

Answer 2

If you need a large amount of data, you can pay a single $250 fee and have the data loaded on an external drive that you provide. See the DataGateway's FAQ #1.