The Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) has created datasets of global ecosystems, croplands, air quality, historical land use, land cover change, and datasets specific to the Amazon Basin. You may freely download any of our datasets.
- 1992 Croplands Dataset
- Ag Datasets
- Agricultural Lands in the Year 2000 (M3-Cropland and M3-Pasture Data)
- Crop Calendar Dataset
- Global Land Use Data
- Global Maps of Urban Extent from Satellite Data
- Global Potential Vegetation Dataset
- Global River Discharge
- Harvested Area and Yields of 175 crops (M3-Crops Data)
- Historical Croplands Dataset, 1700-1992
- Irrigated Lands from Remote Sensing
- Large-Scale Atmosphere-Biosphere Experiment in Amazônia (LBA)
- Satellite Data for Air Quality
- Soil Carbon and Nitrogen
- Urban Land C 2000 and Urban Expansion 2000-2010
- Wisconsin Inventory of Freight Emissions (WIFE 2.0)
1992 Croplands Dataset
Described in Ramankutty, N. and J.A. Foley (1998). Characterizing patterns of global land use: an analysis of global croplands data. Global Biogeochemical Cycles 12(4), 667-685. The data are available in two formats — NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII — at two resolutions, 0.5 degree and 5 minute.
Please contact Navin Ramankutty at navin.ramankutty@ubc.ca with any questions.
Ag Datasets
Collier, Sarah M.; Morris, Elliot J.; Winiecke, Lexie A.; Doiron, Calvin; Butz, Alexander P.; Sanford, Gregg R.; Ruark, Matthew D.; Barford, Carol (2017). Greenhouse gas fluxes from a dairy cropping system at the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping System Trials. Ag Data Commons.
Sadeghpour, Amir; Ketterings, Quirine; Godwin, Gregory ; Vermeylen, Francoise; Barford, Carol (2018). Data from: Agro-environmental consequences of shifting from nitrogen- to phosphorus-based manure management of corn. Ag Data Commons.
Holly, Michael A.; Larson, Rebecca A.; Powell, J. Mark; Ruark, Matt; Barford, Carol (2016). Carbon Dioxide, Methane, Nitrous Oxide, and Ammonia Emissions from Digested and Separated Dairy Manure during Storage and Land Application. Ag Data Commons.
Campbell, Claire; Ruark, Matt; Powell, J. Mark; Barford, Carol (2017). Effects of tannin in dairy cow diets and land application of manure on soil gas fluxes and nitrogen dynamics. Ag Data Commons.
Sherman, Jessica; Jokela, William; Barford, Carol (2017). Manure application methods for alfalfa-grass. Ag Data Commons.
Powell, J. Mark; Vadas, Peter A.; Barford, Carol (2017). Data from: Gas emissions from dairy barnyards. Ag Data Commons.
Sherman, Jessica; Jokela, William; Barford, Carol (2017). Low-Disturbance Manure Incorporation. Ag Data Commons.
Gaillard, Richard K.; Jones, Curtis D.; Ingraham, Pete; Collier, Sarah; Izaurralde, Roberto Cesar; Jokela, William; Osterholz, William; Salas, William; Vadas, Peter; Ruark, Matthew (2017). Data from: Underestimation of N2O emissions in a comparison of the DayCent, DNDC, and EPIC 1 models. Ag Data Commons.
Email Carol Barford at carol.barford@wisc.edu with questions about this dataset.
Agricultural Lands in the Year 2000 (M3-Cropland and M3-Pasture Data)
From Ramankutty et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 1. Geographic distribution of global agricultural lands in the year 2000”, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Vol. 22, GB1003, doi:10.1029/2007GB002952. The data is provided in two formats, NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII, at five-minute resolution in latitude by longitude.
Hosted at McGill University. Please contact Navin Ramankutty at navin.ramankutty@ubc.ca with any questions.
Crop Calendar Dataset
This dataset is the result of digitizing and georeferencing existing Maize Planting Map observations of crop planting and harvesting dates. We then derived climate statistics (e.g., the average temperature at which planting occurs in each region) by merging these crop calendar maps with monthly climatologies from CRU.
This dataset is described in the following publication: Sacks, W.J., D. Deryng, J.A. Foley, and N. Ramankutty (2010). Crop planting dates: an analysis of global patterns. Global Ecology and Biogeography 19, 607-620. DOI: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00551.x.
Global Land Use Data
This site features a global database of land cover and land use. The datasets describe the geographic patterns of the world’s croplands, grazing lands, urban areas, and natural vegetation. Also included are other popular data such as human population density.
Developed by Navin Ramankutty and Seth Price, the site provides easy access to land use data in both tabular format (for countries, states, etc., of the world) as well as in map form. The site allows the user to manipulate the data to suit their own specific requirements and download them in several different formats.
Please contact Navin Ramankutty at navin.ramankutty@ubc.ca with any questions.
Global Maps of Urban Extent from Satellite Data
Although cities cover less than one percent of the world’s surface, urban areas are the nexus of human activity with more than 50 percent of the population and 70 percent to 90 percent of economic activity. As such, material/energy consumption, air pollution, and expanding impervious surface are all concentrated in urban areas, with important environmental implications at local, regional and potentially global scales.
New ways to measure the built environment over large areas are thus critical to answering a wide range of research questions on the role of urbanization in climate, biogeochemistry and hydrological cycles.
In this ongoing research initiative, we have developed a new dataset depicting global urban land circa 2001-2002 based on moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) 500-meter satellite data. Our methods exploit temporal and spectral information in one year of MODIS observations, classified using an ensemble decision tree classification approach.
Global Potential Vegetation Dataset
Described in Ramankutty, N., and J.A. Foley (1999). Estimating historical changes in global land cover: croplands from 1700 to 1992, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 13(4), 997-1027. The data are available in two formats – NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII – at 5min and 0.5 degree resolution.
Please contact Navin Ramankutty at navin.ramankutty@ubc.ca with any questions.
Global River Discharge
This database contains a compilation of monthly mean river discharge data for over 3,500 sites worldwide. The data sources are RivDis2.0, the United States Geological Survey, Brazilian National Department of Water and Electrical Energy, and HYDAT-Environment Canada. The period of record for each station is variable, from three years to greater than 100. All data is in m3/s.
Harvested Area and Yields of 175 crops (M3-Crops Data)
From Monfreda et al. (2008), “Farming the planet: 2. Geographic distribution of crop areas, yields, physiological types, and net primary production in the year 2000,” Global Biogeochemical Cycles, Vol.22, GB1022, doi:10.1029/2007GB002947.
Historical Croplands Dataset, 1700-1992
Described in Ramankutty, N., and J.A. Foley (1999). Estimating historical changes in global land cover: croplands from 1700 to 1992, Global Biogeochemical Cycles 13(4), 997-1027. The data are available in two formats: NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII snapshots, both at 0.5 degree resolution.
Please contact Navin Ramankutty at navin.ramankutty@ubc.ca with any questions.
Irrigated Lands from Remote Sensing
This dataset contains information on irrigated lands at high spatial resolution (500 meters) for the continental United States circa year 2001. It was generated from data collected by the MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument and globally extensive ancillary sources of gridded climate and agricultural data using a supervised decision tree classification algorithm. This is a highly detailed map of irrigated lands in the United States where each pixel in the dataset shows the fraction of irrigated area (0-100 percent) at the native resolution.
Large-Scale Atmosphere-Biosphere Experiment in Amazônia (LBA)
The goal of our NASA-LBA funded work was to investigate how the terrestrial ecosystem and water resources of the Amazon basin are impacted by changing environmental conditions and human activity. To achieve this goal, we developed new comprehensive regional models and datasets to describe the behavior of terrestrial ecosystems and hydrological resources of the Amazon River Basin.
Satellite Data for Air Quality
With support from NASA, the Holloway Group at SAGE has developed a set of user-friendly dataset to support wider utilization of remote sensing data for air quality and health. This growing inventory of data includes:
- Shapefiles of NO2 air pollution from satellite for use in GIS platforms, including the EPA’s EJSCREEN platform for environmental justice
- 12 km x 12 km daily gridded data of NO2 air pollution from satellite for comparison with photochemical grid model output or other data sources
We also provide python scripts for averaging, extracting, plotting gridded data.
Soil Carbon and Nitrogen
SAGE is involved in a long-term campaign of soil sampling and monitoring. In 1999, we began collecting soil carbon, nitrogen, bulk density and other assorted data on land-use history for agricultural land across southcentral Wisconsin. Since the initiation of this campaign, we have sampled over 125 sites that include traditional cropping systems, land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), restored and remnant prairie ecosystems, and pastures.
The majority of these sites are located in Sauk, Columbia, Dane, and Jefferson counties. The searchable database allows for access to these data.
Contact Chris Kucharik at kucharik@wisc.edu with any questions about this dataset.
Urban Land C 2000 and Urban Expansion 2000-2010
The countries that comprise East, Southeast and South Asia collectively make up greater than 50 percent of the global population. During the last decade, this region has become one of the fastest urbanizing locations in the world, with rapidly developing countries such as China moving from 20 percent to 50 percent urbanization in just a few decades.
In the next 20 years, populations are projected to add another 1 billion people in these countries, with 90 percent of that growth occurring in cities and metropolitan areas that comprise less than one percent of the total land area. Clearly, such a transition to urban living has profound economic, social, political, and environmental impacts, depending on the shape, form, and type of urbanization that has occurred.
Information on urban trends are of critical importance for a wide range of researchers, practitioners, governments and institutions interested in food/water security, disaster management, climate change adaptation, and human health and well-being.
This raises several important questions:
- How have cities changed during the last decade?
- Where has urban expansion occurred, and how fast?
- How are population growth and urban spatial expansion related?
With these questions in mind, we are pleased to present a satellite-based dataset depicting urban land circa 2000 and urban expansion 2000-2010 for 17 countries in East and Southeast Asia at 250 meters spatial resolution.
For more information and access to these data, please email Annemarie Schneider at aschneider4@wisc.edu. These maps were developed in tandem with population density maps for the same region, available through the WorldPop project.
Wisconsin Inventory of Freight Emissions (WIFE 2.0)
This dataset contains CMAQ-formatted emissions inventory files for on-road diesel vehicles divided between freight diesel vehicles (WIFE_dies) and other diesel vehicles (oth_dies) for January and July 2007. All emissions were generated using The Freight Analysis Framework v. 3 freight and on-road activity data (vehicle miles traveled) and EPA’s Motor Vehicle Emissions Simulator (MOVES) emissions factor model.
There is an inventory gridded at 36km x 36km for the continental US and an inventory gridded at 12km x 12km for the upper Midwestern US. Grid definitions match LADCO’s model grids. There is a README file included with the data that gives further description of what the files contain.
Contact Erica Bickford at ebickford@uwalumni.com with any questions about this dataset.