A data set describing the land use history of the globe for the past 500 years, and the next 100 years, is now available from the ORNL DAAC.
Harmonized Global Land Use for Years 1500 – 2100, V1. This data set provides fractional land use and land cover patterns annually for the years 1500 - 2100 for the globe at 0.5-degree (~50-km) spatial resolution. 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. Historical land cover data for the years 1500–2005 are based on HYDE 3.1 and future land cover projections for the period 2006–2100 came from four Integrated Assessment Model (IAM) scenarios which reach different levels of radiative forcing by year 2100: MESSAGE (8.5 W/m2), AIM (6 W/m2), GCAM (4.5 W/m2), and IMAGE (2.6 W/m2). A key feature of these data is that historical reconstructions of land use were harmonized (computationally adjusted to minimize differences at the transition period) with modeled future scenarios, allowing for a seamless examination of historical and future land use. The output data present a single consistent, spatially gridded set of land-use change scenarios for studies of human impacts on the past, present, and future Earth system.
Data Set Citation: Chini, L.P., G.C. Hurtt, and S. Frolking. 2014. Harmonized Global Land Use for Years 1500-2100, V1. Data set. Available on-line [http://daac.ornl.gov] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. http://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1248The ORNL DAAC is one of twelve NASA funded Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) and is responsible for archiving and distributing terrestrial ecology and biogeochemical dynamics data.