Cropland cover over the past 300 years in the Scandinavian area

High-resolution historical land cover datasets are essential not only for simulations of climate and environmental dynamics, but also for projections of future land use, food security, climate and biodiversity. However, widely used global datasets are developed for continental-to-global scale analysis and simulations and the accuracy of global datasets depends on the verification of more regional reconstruction results. Based on the collected statistics of cropland area of each administrative unit (Parish/County/Municipality/Province) in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) from 1690 to 2015 (Time points are 1690, 1750, 1810, 1875, 1810, 1930, 1950, 1980, 1999 and 2015), the cropland area at the administrative unit level was allocated into 30-arc second grid cells.