ISLSCP Initiative II

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Vegetation Data

Historical Land Cover & Land Use (1700-1990)

The Historical Land Cover & Land Use data set 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. For this purpose, a historical database of the global environment has been developed: HYDE. 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. The data set can be used to test integrated models of global change.

Data Provider: Kees Klein Goldewijk

Data Files (ISLSCP II Disc #1)

Data Set Documentation

Image Viewing Tutorial

File Information

The names of the files in this data set 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.

The file format consists of ASCII numerical fields of varying length, which are delimited by a single space and arranged in columns and rows. All values are written as integer values from 0 to 19. Missing values are assigned the value of -9999 on all data layers. The files have been compressed using the PKZip program.

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)

Related Pages:
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                Historical Land Cover & Land Use

Revision Date: November 29, 2004