Development of historical maps of land use-land cover, crop type, nutrients, and irrigation across CONUS (1938–2020) at different spatial resolutions

Abstract

Land use-land cover, nutrient inputs from fertilizer and manure, and irrigation are primary anthropogenic drivers of ecosystem functioning and degradation. Historical datasets covering these drivers at various spatial resolutions are essential for analyzing changes in these drivers as well as for input to models that estimate ecosystem outcomes such as water quality and runoff. We describe a new dataset for the conterminous United States (CONUS)-the Harmonized Land Nutrient Irrigation Dataset (HLNID)-that leverages existing datasets both at the county-scale (e.g., Census of Agriculture) and higher resolution land change model outputs (e.g., FORE-SCE) and remotely-sensed products (e.g., NLCD, CDL) to produce annual land use-land cover (including crop type), fertilizer and manure nutrient mass (nitrogen and phosphorus), and irrigation extent for the years 1938–2020. The flexible method can provide data at a range of custom spatial resolutions but we present results at 48 and 250 arcsec. The dataset reveals specific changes such as the increase in corn and soybean (replacing small grains and pasture) in the northern Great Plains since the 1990s, the spatial concentration of manure production in certain regions such as the uplands of the Southern Seaboard, and the expansion of irrigation in regions such as the Prairie Gateway. The method can readily incorporate new raw input datasets (e.g., CDL) to create updated versions but is limited by current time lags in state fertilizer sales data reporting. The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.r4xgxd2rh (Booth and Kucharik, 2026).