LUCAS LUC future land use and land cover change dataset for North America (Version 1.1)

Project: Modelling human LAND surface modifications and its feedbacks on local and regional cliMATE - The project “Modelling human LAND surface modifications and its feedbacks on local and regional climate” (LANDMATE, https://www.hicss-hamburg.de/projects/landmate/index.php.en) is carried out within the framework of the Helmholtz Institute for Climate Service Science (HICSS), a cooperation between Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon and Universität Hamburg. Within LANDMATE, scientists from GERICS and the Institute of Geography (CEN, Universität Hamburg) investigate the direct biophysical effects of land use and land cover change on the local and regional climate. The overall objectives of this project are to: I) Better represent dynamic land use characteristics in a regional climate model, II) Include land management practices into a regional climate model, III) Quantify biophysical impacts of land use dynamics on regional climate variability and change in Europe in the frame of WCRP CORDEX Flagship Pilot Study “Land Use and Climate Across Scales” (LUCAS, https://ms.hereon.de/cordex_fps_lucas/).
Summary: The LUCAS LUC future dataset consists of annual land use and land cover maps from 2016 to 2100 for North America. It is based on land cover data from the LANDMATE PFT dataset for the year 2015. The LANDMATE PFT consists of 16 plant functional types and non-vegetated classes that were converted from the ESA-CCI LC land cover data according to the method of Reinhart et al. (2022). For version 1.1 of the LUCAS LUC dataset, the improved LANDMATE PFT map version 1.1 was employed. The land use change information from the Land-Use Harmonization Data Set version 2 (LUH2 v2.1f, Hurtt et al. 2020) were imposed using the land use translator developed by Hoffmann et al. (2023). The projected land use change information was derived for different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) combinations used in the framework of the 6th phase of Coupled Modelling Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). For each year, a map is provided that contains 16 fields. Each field holds the fraction the respective plant functional types and non-vegetated classes in the total grid cell (0-1). The LUCAS LUC dataset was constructed within the HICSS project LANDMATE and the WCRP flagship pilot study LUCAS to meet the requirements of downscaling experiments within CORDEX.
Plant functional types and non-vegetative classes:
1 - Tropical broadleaf evergreen trees
2 - Tropical deciduous trees
3 - Temperate broadleaf evergreen trees
4 - Temperate deciduous trees
5 - Evergreen coniferous trees
6 - Deciduous coniferous trees
7 - Coniferous shrubs
8 - Deciduous shrubs
9 - C3 grass
10 - C4 grass
11 - Tundra
12 - Swamp
13 - Non-irrigated crops
14 - Irrigated crops
15 - Urban
16 - Bare