Global agricultural lands in the year 2015
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While there are many global geospatial datasets representing the extent of agriculture, they predominantly represent croplands. Only a couple of global data products represent the full global agricultural footprint, including both cropland and pastures. Our own research team's most recent complete publicly available agricultural land cover dataset, including both croplands, and pastures, represents circa 2000. These data, distributed on a graticule of 5 arcmin (∼ 10 km 2 at the Equator), have been integrated into a considerable number and diversity of research studies, modelling, data science, and media applications. Further, users of these data have been interested in them for studying a variety of issues such as land use, food security, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Here we present an updated dataset on the global distribution of agricultural lands (cropland and pasture) circa 2015 (15 years on since the initial study). Past studies that have constructed such datasets have been one-off exercises that have been infrequently repeated due to the amount of effort required. Therefore, in this work, we developed a transparent and reproducible approach to update our data product while also enabling easier reproduction of future datasets. We distribute our 2015 product at the same resolution and formats as the prior product, and accompany it with a full set of replicable code and data for reconstruction. In this article we explain how the data was constructed, with links to the permanent DOIs where the data can be readily downloaded by the user community (Mehrabi et al., 2024; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11540553).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".