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Modeling past and future land use

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Land Use Harmonization
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Harmonized Global Land Use for Years 1500 – 2100, V1

The goal of the Land-use Harmonization project was to prepare a harmonized set of land-use scenarios that smoothly connects historical reconstructions of land-use, with future projections based on different climate scenarios. The land-use harmonization strategy estimates fractional land-use patterns and underlying land-use transitions annually for the time period 1500-2100 at 0.5-degree resolution while minimizing differences at the transition between the historical reconstruction ending conditions and model initial conditions. These harmonized data products provide the first consistent set of land-use change and emission scenarios for studies of human impacts on the past and future global carbon-climate system.

Land use categories of cropland, pasture, primary land, secondary (recovering) land, and urban land, and underlying annual land-use transitions, are included. Annual data on age and biomass density of secondary land, as well as annual wood harvest, are included for each grid cell. Data are presented as a series of twenty (20) different data products representing different past and future model scenarios. There are a total of 560 NetCDF v4 files (*.nc4), one for each combination of data product and land use variable.

For additional information about the algorithms, inputs, and options used in creating the land use transitions data, please refer to the documentation at Land Use Harmonization V1.

Data Acknowledgements

Data authors: L.P. Chini, G.C. Hurtt, and S. Frolking
Data center: ORNL DAAC (http://daac.ornl.gov)
Sponsor: NASA EOSDIS (http://earthdata.nasa.gov)
Data Set DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1248
Land Use Harmonization
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Land Use Harmonization