Development of the GTAP Land Use Data Base for 2011

The GTAP land use data bases provide data on land cover items including accessible forest, pasture, cropland, inaccessible forest, shrubland, savannah, and build up land areas at the Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ) level by country. In addition, they provide data on harvested area and crop production at the AEZ level by crop and country. Avetisyan et al. (2011) documented all the data sources, methods, and assumption used in developing land use data bases for 2001 and 2004. Those data sources, methods, and assumptions were used to generate a land use data base for 2007 as well (Avetisyan, Baldos, and Hertel 2011). To develop a land use data for 2011, we encountered a major obstacle. We do not have available the spatial global land cover data for 2011 by AEZ and country, which was available for the development of the previous versions of the data set (Ramankutty 2012). The gridded data base by Ramankutty (2012) cover a long time period starting from 1700 and ending in 2007. In order to solve this problem, we use the FAOSTAT data base developed by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Currently, this data base provides land cover data at the country level up to 2011. Following the earlier versions of the GTAP land use data bases, we also rely on the FAOSTAT data to update the GTAP data on harvested areas and crops produced in 2011. This paper is divided into sections with each one covering a particular part of the update for land use database. Following are the main components: Land cover development items by country, region and AEZ; Comparison in land cover data between 2004 and 2011; Harvested area and crop production by country, region and AEZ; Crop production and harvested area by crop, region and AEZ; Changes in harvested area and crop production for 2004-2011 Thus, this document provides a complete description of the new land use database and compares 2004 with 2011.