Historic Croplands Dataset, 1700-1992

This dataset is 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 is available in two formats, NetCDF and ArcINFO ASCII snapshots, both at 0.5 degree resolution.

The NetCDF download (46MB) contains the following files:

  1. README
  2. crop_1700-1992_v1.0.nc.gz – the global historical croplands data set
  3. version 1.0. file format = NetCDF. compressed using the Unix ‘gzip’ command, approximately 48 Mbytes compressed, and 304 Mbytes uncompressed
  4. readnc.f – a FORTRAN program to read the NetCDF files
  5. ies-io.f – a FORTRAN program that contains NetCDF subroutines
  6. makefile – a makefile to compile the programs used to read the NetCDF files

PLEASE NOTE: this global dataset is meant to be used only for continental to global scale applications. Use caution when using this dataset at local scales.

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