Moirai version 3: A data processing system to generate recent historical land inputs for global modeling applications at various scales

Abstract

The Moirai land data system, written in C and R, is designed to produce recent historical land inputs for an integrated human-Earth systems model. The primary function of Moirai is to combine spatially explicit input data (e.g., raster images) with tabular input data (e.g., crop price table) to generate spatially-referenced tabular data of crop production, crop harvested area, land value, irrigated and rainfed crop area, water footprint, soil and vegetation carbon density of unmanaged land, and historical land use/cover. These data are aggregated to user-defined geographic boundaries within 231 countries and the default boundaries are defined globally by 235 watersheds. The production, harvested area, and land value outputs reconstruct those available from the Global Trade Analysis Project, while the other outputs provide additional information for various applications, such as initializing or evaluating a land use change model or an economic general/partial equilibrium model. Furthermore, Moirai is a modular system that can be updated and customized through replacement and addition of source data.