A cultivated planet in 2010: 2. the global gridded agricultural production maps

Abstract. Data on global agricultural production are usually available as statistics at administrative units, which does not give any diversity and spatial patterns thus is less informative for subsequent spatially explicit agricultural and environmental analyses. In the second part of the two-paper series, we introduce SPAM2010 – the latest global spatially explicit datasets on agricultural production circa year 2010 – and elaborate on the improvement of the SPAM (Spatial Production Allocation Model) dataset family since year 2000. SPAM2010 adds further methodological and data enhancements to the available crop downscaling modeling: it not only applies the latest global synergy cropland layer (see Lu et al., submitted to the current journal) and other relevant data, but also expands the estimates of crop area, yield and production from 20 to 42 major crops under four farming systems across a global 5 arc-minute grid. All the SPAM maps are freely available at the MapSPAM website (http://mapspam.info/), which not only acts as a tool for validating and improving the performance of the SPAM maps by collecting feedbacks from users, but also dedicates as platform providing archived global agricultural production maps for better targeting the Sustainable Development Goals by making proper agricultural and rural development policies and investments. In particular, SPAM2010 can be downloaded via an open-data repository (DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PRFF8V, IFPRI, 2019).