The Historical Land Cover and Land Use data set consists of two files, and was developed to provide the global change community with historical land use estimates. The data set describes historical land use changes over a 300-year historical period (1700-1990).
Testing against historical data is an important step for validating integrated models of global environmental change. Owing to long time lags in the climate and biogeochemical systems, these models should aim to simulate the land use dynamics for long periods, i.e., spanning decades to centuries. Developing such models requires an understanding of past and current trends and is therefore strongly data dependent. A historical database of the global environment (HYDE) was used to determine historical statistical inventories on agricultural land (census data, tax records, land surveys, etc) and different spatial analysis techniques were used to create a geographically-explicit data set of land use change, with a regular time interval.
This data set is one of the products of the International Satellite Land-Surface Climatology Project, Initiative II (ISLSCP II) data collection, which contains 50 global time series data sets for the ten-year period 1986 to 1995. A complete description of the data, their derivation, acknowledgements, and references provided by the ISLSCP II Data Management Staff is included with this data set as a companion file named 1_historic_landcover_doc.pdf.
ISLSCP II is a consistent collection of data sets that were compiled from existing data sources and algorithms, and were designed to satisfy the needs of modelers and investigators of the global carbon, water and energy cycle. The data were acquired from a number of U.S. and international agencies, universities, and institutions. The data and documentation have undergone two peer reviews.
ISLSCP is one of several projects of Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) [http://www.gewex.org/] and has the lead role in addressing land-atmosphere interactions -- process modeling, data retrieval algorithms, field experiment design and execution, and the development of global data sets.
Cite this data set as follows:
Goldewijk, K.K. 2010. ISLSCP II Historical Land Cover and Land Use, 1700-1990. In Hall, Forest G., G. Collatz, B. Meeson, S. Los, E. Brown de Colstoun, and D. Landis (eds.). ISLSCP Initiative II Collection. Data set. Available on-line [http://daac.ornl.gov/] from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, U.S.A. doi:10.3334/ORNLDAAC/967
The archived data sets for ISLSCP II have been organized by categories. This data set is in the vegetation category--a collection of vegetation and albedo data sets.
Data Set Spatial Extent: Global gridded
Westernmost Longitude: -180 W
Easternmost Longitude: 180 E
Northernmost Latitude: 90 N
Southernmost Latitude: -90 S
Projection: Geographic
Data Set Spatial Resolution: half and one degree in both latitude and longitude
Data Set Temporal Extent: 1700 through 1990
Data File FormatAll of the data files in each data set within the ISLSCP Initiative II data collection are in ESRI ASCII GRID format for ArcInfo. The file format consists of numerical fields of varying length, which are delimited by a single space and arranged in columns and rows.
The data files have been combined according to spatial resolution: 1 degree and half degree, respectively.
* historic_landcover_1deg.zip
* historic_landcover_hdeg.zip
The names of the individual files in each zip file above use the following naming convention:
historic_landcover_hd_YYYY.asc -- where hd stands for a half degree spatial resolution and YYYY is the year from 1700 to 1990. The files in this data set all contain 720 columns by 360 rows.
historic_landcover_1d_YYYY.asc -- 1d stands for a 1-degree spatial resolution and YYYY is the year from 1700 to 1990. The files in this data set all contain 360 columns by 180 rows.
historic_landcover_hd_chngmp.asc--shows the differences between the original hd degree land/water mask and the hd degree land/water mask used in this collection.
Data file naming conventions are described in the 0_historic_landcover_readme.txt
Land cover/use classes are assigned the values below (note that values 3 and 4 are non-existent):
| Class # | Biome Type |
|---|---|
| 0 | Oceans/Water |
| 1 | Cultivated land |
| 2 | Pasture/land used for grazing |
| 5 | Ice |
| 6 | Tundra |
| 7 | Wooded tundra |
| 8 | Boreal forest |
| 9 | Cool conifer forest |
| 10 | Temperate mixed forest |
| 11 | Temperate deciduous forest |
| 12 | Warm mixed forest |
| 13 | Grassland/Steppe |
| 14 | Hot desert |
| 15 | Scrubland |
| 16 | Savanna |
| 17 | Tropical woodland |
| 18 | Tropical forest |
| 19 | No data over land (e.g. Antarctica) |
These data are available through the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) [http://daac.ornl.gov].
E-mail: uso@daac.ornl.gov
Telephone: +1 (865) 241-3952