Global gridded crop harvested area, production, yield, and monthly physical area data circa 2015

Danielle Grogan,Dominik Wisser,Stanley Glidden,Alex Prusevich,Steve Frolking

doi:10.1038/s41597-021-01115-2

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Background & SummaryCropland covers about 10% of the Earth’s land surface, making it an essential component of all land surface and Earth system models
We present our methodology for updating the Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ) 2010 products to 2015, providing more recent data on production, yield, and harvested areas; these data are available to the wider global modeling community
The Annual Crop Data was generated first, the Monthly Cropland Data was calculated based on the Harvest Area results of the Annual Data (Fig. 1)

Summary

Background & Summary

Cropland covers about 10% of the Earth’s land surface, making it an essential component of all land surface and Earth system models. Cropland area increased by approximately 5% from 2000 to 2015 (~775,000 km2)[5], though with great spatial variation even in the direction of this change (positive vs negative) at the country, watershed, and grid cell level[1,5] We address these cropland data needs by producing a year 2015 gridded annual harvested area, production, and yield dataset for 26 crops and crop categories (e.g., wheat, vegetables), disaggregated by irrigated and rainfed management. FAO is currently using the GAEZ+ 2015 data in an ongoing study

Methods

Findings

Code availability