Data on global agricultural production are usually
available as statistics at administrative units, which does not give any
diversity and spatial patterns; thus they are 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 2010 – and
elaborate on the improvement of the SPAM (Spatial Production Allocation
Model) dataset family since 2000. SPAM2010 adds further methodological
and data enhancements to the available crop downscaling modeling, which
mainly include the update of base year, the extension of crop list, and the
expansion of subnational administrative-unit coverage. Specifically, 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 arcmin grid. All the SPAM
maps are freely available at the MapSPAM website (http://mapspam.info/, last access: 11 December 2020),
which not only acts as a tool for validating and improving the performance
of the SPAM maps by collecting feedback from users but is also a
platform providing archived global agricultural-production maps for better
targeting the Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, SPAM2010 can be
downlo...

A cultivated planet in 2010 – Part 2: The global gridded agricultural-production maps

10.5194/essd-12-3545-2020