A Global Gridded Land Use and Land Cover Change Dataset for the 21st Century Downscaled from GCAM Projections

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) represents one of the most important human impacts on the Earth system and has been considered as a key component of Earth system models (ESMs). LULCC directly alters land surface albedo, roughness, and boundary layer structure, and hence modulate local to regional land-atmosphere-cloud interactions from sub-daily to seasonal scales. ESM simulations requires LULCC inputs at appropriate time steps and spatial resolutions to accommodate the requirements of the ESMs as well as capture the spatial heterogeneity of Earth system processes. Projections of future LULCC largely rely on mathematical models that bring socioeconomic and other diverse sectoral information together in a coherent framework to simulate the interactions between natural and human systems. The Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM), is one of the most widely used models that provides LULCC projections at region-agroecological or water basin scale. Demeter, an open-source model recently developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is designed and calibrated to translate projections of future LULCC into high-resolution representations of time-evolving land cover suitable for input into complex ESMs in a variety of formats and resolutions. Here we report the downscaled global gridded LULCC dataset (0.05° by 0.05°) and the associated uncertainties with Demeter and GCAM projections for 2015-2100 under the GCAM official scenarios, based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs, Calvin et al., 2017). The new dataset will benefit future climate modeling efforts and improve understanding of human-induced impacts on the Earth system.