HLUH-5km: A high-resolution global historical land use harmonization dataset from 1900 to 2023 reconstructed based on remote sensing and statistic data

Global Historical Land Use Harmonization dataset (HLUH-5km) provides spatially explicit fractional coverage (0–1) of six major land-use types (water and snow, urban, cropland, grazing land, forest, and non-forest) at 0.05° spatial resolution for the period 1900–2023. Because water and snow areas are assumed to remain constant over time, only a single baseline layer is provided for this class, while the other land-use categories vary through time. Before 1950 the dataset is reported at 10-year intervals, and after 1950 it is updated annually. National land-use areas were reconstructed primarily from statistics reported by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and subsequently allocated to grid cells using a probability-based spatial allocation framework that integrates environmental and socioeconomic constraints.

The HLUH-5km dataset is distributed as five compressed ZIP archives containing the time-varying land-use fraction layers and one GeoTIFF file representing the static water and snow layer.

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China [grant number 2023YFB3907403].