MIRCA2000—Global monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas around the year 2000: A new high‐resolution data set for agricultural and hydrological modeling

Abstract

To support global‐scale assessments that are sensitive to agricultural land use, we developed the global data set of monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas around the year 2000 (MIRCA2000). With a spatial resolution of 5 arc min (about 9.2 km at the equator), MIRCA2000 provides both irrigated and rainfed crop areas of 26 crop classes for each month of the year. The data set covers all major food crops as well as cotton. Other crops are grouped into categories (perennial, annual, and fodder grasses). It represents multicropping systems and maximizes consistency with census‐based national and subnational statistics. According to MIRCA2000, 25% of the global harvested areas are irrigated, with a cropping intensity (including fallow land) of 1.12, as compared to 0.84 for the sum of rainfed and irrigated harvested crops. For the dominant crops (rice (1.7 million km² harvested area), wheat (2.1 million km²), and maize (1.5 million km²)), roughly 60%, 30%, and 20% of the harvested areas are irrigated, respectively, and half of the citrus, sugar cane, and cotton areas. While wheat and maize are the crops with the largest rainfed harvested areas (1.5 million km² and 1.2 million km², respectively), rice is clearly the crop with the largest irrigated harvested area (1.0 million km²), followed by wheat (0.7 million km²) and maize (0.3 million km²). Using MIRCA2000, 33% of global crop production and 44% of total cereal production were determined to come from irrigated agriculture.