This dataset is a version of the ESA WorldCereal, offering the dataset as point locations in cloud-native geospatial format for maximum ease of use and interoperability with data science and ML workflows. The original dataset is distributed in GeoTIFF raster (.tif) format, and is available for download at https://zenodo.org/record/7875105. For each of maize and winter cereals, there are 106 .tif files corresponding to the 106 Agricultural Ecological Zones (AEZs) across the globe. Spring cereals are only covered for 21 of the 106 AEZs.
The majority of the following descriptive information about the dataset is copied from the official dataset publication; it is the canonical source data and remains the source of truth. This dataset just makes the data more accessible through transforming it into different formats. The description for the original dataset is as follows:
Here we present the European Space Agency funded WorldCereal system, a global, seasonal, and reproducible crop and irrigation mapping system that addresses existing limitations in current global-scale crop and irrigation mapping. WorldCereal generates a range of global products, including temporary crop extent, seasonal maize and cereals maps, seasonal irrigation maps, seasonal active cropland maps, and confidence layers providing insights into expected product quality. The WorldCereal product suite for the year 2021 presented here serves as a global demonstration of the dynamic open-source WorldCereal system. The presented products are fully validated, e.g., global user's and producer's accuracies for the annual temporary crop product are 88.5 % and 92.1 %, respectively.
Modifications were made to the original dataset which are covered in detail in this tutorial, which also provides the code used to create this dataset. Briefly, for each of maize, winter cereals, and spring cereals, points locations were generated for each AEZ by randomly selecting a proportion of the classified pixels (0.01% in this case). While generating the points, we added Crop and aez_id attributes which denote the crop type and AEZ.
In further processing, five new attributes were added, all from the Natural Earth Features country- and state-level boundary datasets (admin level 0 and 1, respectively) available through cartopy. Specifically, from the country-level boundaries dataset, we added Country (Admin 0), Region (World Bank), Subregion, and Continent attributes. From the state-level boundaries dataset, we added the State (Admin 1) attribute. Additional processing steps are covered in detail here.
You can use the browse links to download the GeoParquet version of the dataset.
You can also access the S3 bucket directly with S3 tools (aws cli, boto3, etc), its S3 URI is s3://us-west-2.opendata.source.coop/streambatch/worldcereal/world_cereals_scaled_final_all.geoparquet.
The paper explaining this dataset (Van Tricht et al., 2023, in pre-print), including a full description of methodology, may be found at https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-184/, and the DOI is: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-184.