Wei, Xueqiong; Widgren, Mats; Li, Beibei; Ye, Yu; Fang, Xiuqi; Zhang, Chengpeng; Chen, Tiexi (2021): Cropland cover over the past 300 years in Scandinavia [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.926591

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. Based on the collected cropland area of each administrative unit (Parish/County/Municipality/Province) in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) from statistics and previous studies, the cropland area during 1690-1999 (Time points are 1690, 1750, 1810, 1875, 1810, 1930, 1950, 1980 and 1999) at the administrative unit level was allocated into 1km grid cells.

Scandinavia Cropland 300 V2 is the new version of the Scandinavia Cropland 300 V1 (doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.919929)

There are three changes in Scandinavia Cropland 300 V2:

1. The cropland area of each administrative unit (Parish/County/Municipality/Province) in Norway was revised from "agricultural land ("Cropland land" and "Permanent meadows and pastures")" to "cropland"(without "Permanent meadows and pastures"). The definitions of "Cropland" in Sweden, Norway and Denmark are the same in V2.

2. The method for cropland area allocating to 1km * 1km grids has been updated, and the V2 dataset is more accurate than V1.

3. To ensure the gridded cropland data's accuracy, the time slice of 2015 has been deleted.