Global crop-specific nitrogen fertilization dataset in 1961–2020

Abstract

Nitrogen (N) is an important nutrient for crop growth. However, the overuse of N fertilizers has led to a series of devastating global environmental issues. Recent studies show that multiple datasets have been created for agricultural N fertilizer application with varied temporal or spatial resolutions, nevertheless, how to synchronize and use these datasets becomes problematic due to the inconsistent temporal coverages, spatial resolutions, and crop-specific allocations. Here we reconstructed a comprehensive dataset for crop-specific N fertilization at 5-arc-min resolution (~10 km by 10 km) during 1961-2020, including N application rate, types, and placements. The N fertilization data was segmented by 21 crop groups, 13 fertilizer types, and 2 fertilization placements. Comparison analysis showed that our dataset is aligned with previous estimates. Our spatiotemporal N fertilization dataset could be used for the land surface models to quantify the effects of agricultural N fertilization practices on food security, climate change, and environmental sustainability.