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Research Highlights

Publication Date
20 January 2022

Global Gridded Crop Harvested Area, Production, Yield, and Monthly Physical Area Data Circa 2015

Subtitle
This new set of data products and the underlying method are foundational tools for Earth System and Multisector Dynamics models that aim to represent the current state of agriculture at a high resolution.
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MSD models require information on the location and timing of crop production. As agricultural land areas and practices shift over time, we need to update our model input datasets.
MSD models require information on the location and timing of crop production. As agricultural land areas and practices shift over time, we need to update our model input datasets.
Science

Crop data at high spatial and temporal resolution is a required input for many fine-scale Earth systems and Multisector Dynamics models. While ongoing remote sensing projects are working to update these essential data from the most recent to more current timeframes, previous work only provided data up to the year 2010. Here we develop a downscaling algorithm that makes use of the most recent country-level crop statistics, grid cell crop distribution data, and spatially-distributed crop-specific planting and harvesting schedules to generate an internally consistent gridded dataset of crop harvested area, production, yield, and monthly physical area for 26 crops and crop categories.

Impact

Data produced by this work is publicly available, with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), and full metadata. Along with this paper – which details the methods employed to produce the data, and provides a link to a GitHub repository with associated code products – this data collection enables high-resolution models to better represent the current state of agriculture.

Summary

Here we provide an update to global gridded annual and monthly crop datasets. This new dataset uses the crop categories established by the Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ) Version 3 model, which is based on the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) crop production data. We used publicly available data from the FAOSTAT database as well as GAEZ Version 4 global gridded dataset to generate circa 2015 annual crop harvested area, production, and yields by crop production system (irrigated and rainfed) for 26 crops and crop categories globally at 5-minute resolution. We additionally used available data on crop rotations, cropping intensity, and planting and harvest dates to generate monthly gridded cropland data for physical areas for the 26 crops by production system. These data are in standard georeferenced gridded format and can be used by any global hydrology, land surface, or other earth system model that requires gridded annual or monthly crop data inputs.

Point of Contact
John Weyant
Institution(s)
Stanford University
Funding Program Area(s)
MSD
Project(s)
A Multi-Model, Multi-Scale Research Program in Stressors, Responses, and Coupled Systems Dynamics at the Energy-Water-Land Nexus (Program on Coupled Human and Earth Systems - "PCHES")
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