Cropland cover over the past 300 years in Scandinavia

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 cropland area of each administrative unit (Parish/County/Municipality/Province) in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) from statistics and previous studies, the cropland area during 1690-1999 (Time points are 1690, 1750, 1810, 1875, 1810, 1930, 1950, 1980 and 1999) at the administrative unit level was allocated into 1km grid cells.