Global Agricultural Lands for the Year 2000

This data set represents the proportion of land areas used as cropland (land used for the cultivation of food) and pasture land (land used to support grazing animals) in the year 2000. It combines agricultural inventory data and satellite-derived land cover data. Cropland and pasture data were derived from national level statistics (1998-2002) from the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) FAOSTAT database for 159 countries; FAO data were not available for another 19 countries. The agricultural inventory data was used to train a land cover classification data set obtained by merging Boston University’s MODIS-derived land cover product and the Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT) VEGETATION based Global Land Cover 2000 (GLC2000) data set which produced 391 composite land cover classes. Cropland and pasture area estimates from land cover data sets were aggregated to the subnational administrative level and then compared with the inventory data to determine correction factors. A simple set of climatic parameters was used to mask obviously nonagriculture areas within the satellite data sets. Protected/minimal use areas in the central part of the Australian continent were also masked which otherwise would have been classified entirely as pasture. The data are presented at 5 min (~10 km) spatial resolution in longitude by longitude, along with statistical confidence intervals on the estimates, in two formats – NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII. The global and regional data are also available in Geographic Tagged Image File Format (GeoTIFF) and ESRI GRID formats and maps in Portable Document Format (PDF) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) formats from the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). The visual presentation of these data demonstrates the extent to which human land use for agriculture has changed the Earth and in which areas this change is most intense. According to the data, there were 15.0 million km2 of cropland (12% of the Earth’s ice-free land surface) and 28.0 million km2 of pasture (22%) in the year 2000. For details on methods and results, see Ramankutty, N., A.T. Evan, C. Monfreda, and J.A. Foleyl. 2008. Farming the planet: 1. Geographic distribution of global agricultural lands in the year 2000. Global Biogeochemical Cycles 22, GB1003, doi:10.1029/2007GB002952.