Dataset of cropland cover from 1690 to 2015 in Scandinavia

Abstract

Abstract. High-resolution historical land cover datasets are essential not only for simulations of climate and environmental dynamics, but also for projections of future land use, food security, climate and biodiversity. However, widely used global datasets are developed for continental-to-global scale analysis and simulations and the accuracy of global datasets depends on the verification of more regional reconstruction results. In this study, based on the collected statistics of cropland area of each administrative unit (Parish/ Municipality/ County/ Province) in Scandinavia from 1690 to 2015, the cropland area at the administrative unit level was allocated into 30-arc second grid cells. The results indicated that the cropland area increased from 1.81 million ha in 1690 to 7.10 million ha in 1950, then decreased to 6.02 million ha in 2015. Before 1810, cropland cover expanded in southern Scandinavia and remained stable in northern. From 1810 to 1910, northern Scandinavia experienced slight expansion and the cropland area increased rapidly in the southern part of the study area. Then, cropland area changed gently. After 1950, cropland area began to decrease in most regions, especially in the east of Scandinavia. When comparing HYDE3.2 with this study, differences in cropland distribution over the past 300 years are mainly observed in regions which were highly cultivated. Our dataset can be used by future environment and climate models in Scandinavia. The dataset can be downloaded from https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.919929 (Wei et al., 2020).