Data set on changes in crop suitability under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 emission scenario for thirty five crops in the Levant, Tigris-Euphrates, and Nile Basin

We provide spatial data on changes in crop suitability for thirty six crops in the Levant, Tigris Euprates, and Nile River Basins between two periods: current conditions as the average of the years 1970-2000, and projected future conditions for the year 2050 as an average for the years 2041-2060. We generated the data by simulating mean monthly climatic data from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). These climatic data are downscaled to the 1-km scale from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (AR5) (Stocker, 2014). Mean monthly climatic datasets were obtained from the WorldClim database (http://worldclim.com/) to generate the suitability datasets using the FAO EcoCrop model (Eastman, 2015) under the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 emission scenario for three General Circulation Models: CCSM4, GFDL-CM3, and HadGEM2-ES with a spatial resolution of 30 arc-seconds. The crops are alfalfa, apple, apricot, barley, beans, cabbage, cannabis, carrot, cherry, chickpeas, clover, coffee, cotton, cucumber, dates, eggplant, grape, lettuce, maize, olive, onion, orange, peas, pepper, potato, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugarcane, sunflower, tobacco, tomato, vetch, watermelon, and wheat.