A spatial cropland dataset for South Asia from 640 to 2016 CE

Reconstructing historical land use is essential to reveal the impact of anthropogenic land cover change on the environment. But previous reconstructions for South Asia were relatively insufficient. Here, we constructed a land suitability model by incorporating topographical, soil, and climatic factors to allocate previous cropland area estimates to a gird of 0.5 arcmin, and generated a geographically explicit cropland dataset from 640 to 2016 CE for South Asia. This dataset presents the spatial distribution of cropland fraction in South Asia (including present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) from 640CE to 2016 CE. It contains 21 temporal layers corresponding to the years: 640, 700, 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400, 1500, 1600, 1750, 1801, 1871, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960, 1980, 2000, 2016. The data are provided in GeoTIFF format with a spatial resolution of 0.5 arcmin, using the geographic coordinate system GCS_WGS_1984. The size of each raster file is approximately 63.4 MB.