These are gridded maps of planting dates, harvesting dates and related variables. The maps are provided as ArcINFO ASCII files, with a 0.5 degree spatial resolution. Note that these files have been regridded from the “native” 5-minute resolution.
The maps for each crop are provided as gzipped, tarred files; upon unzipping and untarring these, you will find a directory containing a *.asc file for each variable. The first 6 lines of each file contain header information describing the grid and the missing value flag. The 7th line contains the data, in row-major order. The political.level variable is stored as integer data; all other variables are stored as floating point data.
The unfilled maps contain data only for grid cells in regions where we actually have crop calendar observations. The filled maps contain spatially extrapolated crop calendar data (see the README file for more details and caveats about these extrapolated data).
Please read the README file before using these data.
File size: The zipped files are about 30-170 KB for each crop; the unzipped files are about 15 MB for each crop.
The numbers in parentheses give the number of observations for each crop.