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  • Matters Arising
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Reply to: Measuring the world’s cropland area

Nature Food volume 4, pages 33–34 (2023)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 05 January 2023

This article has been updated

replying to: F. Tubiello et al. Nature Food https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00667-9 (2023)

In their recent communication, F. Tubiello et al. (2023)1 raise several issues around the application of land use definitions. They correctly pointed to the fact that the major disagreements between the existing cropland maps are due to differences in definitions of land use classes. We disagree, however, that the use of the term “croplands” must follow the definition used by the FAO. FAO’s data comes from countries whose definitions of crop area may differ and may vary through time2,3. We believe that by providing a clear, comprehensive, and consistently employed definition of the term “cropland” in our study, our results and their meaning may be easily understood and used to support decision-making. Our cropland class definition was designed for mapping using remotely sensed data. Our definition is consistent with the “land under temporary crops” sub-category of the “arable land” category used for FAO reporting4,5,6, and the statistical analysis confirmed the consistency of this particular land use class area estimates. We agree with the observation of Tubiello et al. (2023) that our cropland definition excludes permanent crops. We, however, disagree that it decreases the value of our maps and analysis. Other datasets, from the maps of the pathfinding International Geosphere Biosphere Program7 to ESA’s WorldCover8, employ the same definitions of annual croplands that excludes woody perennial crops.

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Fig. 1

Change history

  • 14 March 2023

    In the version of this article initially published, there were links but not a numbered reference to the original Matters Arising, which is now included as ref. 1 in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Peter Potapov, Matthew C. Hansen, Svetlana Turubanova, Alexandra Tyukavina, Viviana Zalles, Xiao-Peng Song & Ahmad Khan

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  1. Peter Potapov
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  2. Matthew C. Hansen
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  3. Svetlana Turubanova
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  4. Alexandra Tyukavina
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  5. Viviana Zalles
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  6. Xiao-Peng Song
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  7. Ahmad Khan
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Contributions

P.P., M.H, V.Z., A.T., and X.S. wrote the manuscript, S.T. and A.K. provided data and data visualization.

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Correspondence to Peter Potapov.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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: Nature Food thanks Shuai Wang, Qiangyi Yu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Potapov, P., Hansen, M.C., Turubanova, S. et al. Reply to: Measuring the world’s cropland area. Nat Food 4, 33–34 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00668-8

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