Global Agricultural Land Resources – A High Resolution Suitability Evaluation and Its Perspectives until 2100 under Climate Change Conditions (v3.0)

Agricultural land resources – a global suitability evaluation (v3.0)

Local climate, soil and topography determine the conditions under which agricultural crops are suitable for growth or not. The methodology uses a fuzzy logic approach that is described in Zabel et al. (2014). The approach is based on Liebig's law of the minimum. Accordingly, plant suitability is determined not by total available resources, but by the scarcest resource. The limiting factor depends on the local environmental conditions and the crop-specific requirements, that are taken from literature. 

Determining Agricultural Suitability

Agricultural suitability is calculated for each of 5 climate models (GFDL, HadGEM2, IPSL, MIROC and NorESM1) from the AR5 ISIMIP fast track protocol. Daily climate model data for temperature, precipitation and solar radiation are statistically downscaled to 30 arc seconds spatial resolution. A monthly bias-correction is applied using WorldClim data. The provided suitability data refers to the model median over the 5 climate simulations. Soil data is taken from the Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD) v1.21. Considered soil properties are texture, proportion of coarse fragments and gypsum, base saturation, pH content, organic carbon content, salinity, sodicity. Soil depth is taken into account according to Pelletier et al. (2015). Topography data is applied from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). Irrigation has strong impact on the suitability of crops and is considered in this approach.

Agricultural Suitability

The agricultural suitability data is provided at a spatial resolution of 30 arc seconds (approximately 1 km2 at the equator). The dataset contains four time periods (1980-2009, 2010-2039, 2040-2069, 2070-2099) and two climate change scenarios (RCP2.6 and RCP 8.5). Agricultural suitability is provided for rainfed conditions and for irrigated conditions seperately. Additionally, we provide a dataset in which the current irrigation areas according to Maier et al. (2018) are applied. The suitability is provided for 23 food, feed, fibre, and 1st and 2nd generation bio-energy crops. An 'overall suitability' is provided for all crops that considers the most suitable crop on each pixel. Additionally, we provide a dataset excluding 2nd generation bioenergy crops (18-23) from the overall aggregation of crops.

Food, feed, fiber and first-generation bioenergy crops

Barley
Potato
Sugarbeet

Cassava
Rapeseed
Sugarcane

Groundnut
Rice
Sunflower

Maize
Rye
Summer wheat

Millet
Sorghum
Winter wheat

Oilpalm
Soybean

Second-generation bioenergy crops

Jatropha
Reed canary grass

Miscanthus
Eucalyptus

Switchgrass
Willow

Growing Season Adaptation

The agricultural suitability considers the adaptation of the growing season. For each pixel and crop, the growing season is optimized throughout the year, taking the annual course of precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation as well as their interplay, into account.

Most Suitable Crop

The most suitable crop for each pixel is provided in the data. Please note that a value of 126 means that no crop suitable and 127 means that multiple crops have the same suitability.

Further information

Detailled information are available in the following publications:

Zabel F, Putzenlechner B, Mauser W (2014) Global Agricultural Land Resources – A High Resolution Suitability Evaluation and Its Perspectives until 2100 under Climate Change Conditions. PLOS ONE 9(9): e107522. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107522

Cronin, J., Zabel, F., Dessens, O., Anandarajah, G. (2020): Land suitability for energy crops under scenarios of climate change and land-use. GCB Bioenergy, 12(8). doi: 10.1111/gcbb.12697

Schneider. J.M., Zabel, F., Mauser, W. (2022): Global inventory of suitable, cultivable and available cropland under different scenarios and policies. Scientific Data 9, 527. doi: 10.1038/s41597-022-01632-8

Meier, J., Zabel, F., Mauser, W. (2018): A global approach to estimate irrigated areas – a comparison between different data and statistics. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 1119–1133, 2018. doi: 10.5194/hess-22-1119-201

Pelletier, J. D., Broxton, P. D., Hazenberg, P., Zeng, X., Troch, P. A., Niu, G.-Y., Williams, Z., Brunke, M. A., and Gochis, D. (2016), A gridded global data set of soil, immobile regolith, and sedimentary deposit thicknesses for regional and global land surface modeling, J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst., 8, 41– 65, doi: 10.1002/2015MS000526.

Improvements in v3.0

Compared to the previous version (v2.0), this version (v3.0) uses updated input data for soil (HWSD v1.21) and high resolution irrigated areas (Maier et al. 2018), and additionally considers soil depth (Pelletier et al. 2016). Moreover, the suitability is calculated for an ensemble of 5 climate models, and is available for more crops, including a number of second generation bioenergy crops.

Contact

Please contact: Dr. Florian Zabel, [e-mail], Department of Geography, LMU München (www.geografie.uni-muenchen.de)