Global 30-m annual cropland extent dynamics (2000–2024): A consistent baseline of structural evolution and regional disparities

Abstract. Accurate quantification of the structural evolution of global agricultural systems is critical for assessing food security and monitoring planetary boundaries. However, current agricultural monitoring is hindered by a baseline that reflects the continuous, annual nature of agricultural management and distinguishes active cultivation cycles from permanent structural changes. Existing products typically rely on fragmented snapshots, multi-year aggregation, or generalized and inconsistent definitions (introducing systematic bias and noise into trend analysis). To bridge this gap, we generated the first Global 30-m Annual Cropland Extent Dynamics (GACED30) dataset (2000–2024). Our continuous mapping framework integrates the gap-free SDC30 to capture the intra-annual phenological transitions distinctive of active cultivation, employs a spectral-semantic sample alignment strategy to resolve the inconsistencies across different cropland sample sets, and applies a rule-based processing to mitigate the spectral ambiguity between active fallow and natural bareland. Furthermore, we derived grid-based Structural Evolution Indicators via continuous statistical trend analysis, utilizing the full 25-year time-series density to rigorously quantify expansion and abandonment trajectories. Comprehensive assessment demonstrates the reliability of GACED30, which achieves a high overall accuracy of 96.5 % and significantly outperforms existing global products (e.g., GLAD Cropland, ESA World Cover and GLC_FCS30D) in capturing temporal stability. Crucially, GACED30 exhibits strong agreement with FAO national statistics, achieving a high correlation in cropland area (R²:0.95) and an 81.1 % consistency in production trends. Based on this consistent baseline, we analyzed the structural evolution of global agriculture, estimating the 2024 cropland area at 1488.5 Mha with a net change rate of 1.2 Mha/year. Our trend analysis reveals a distinct global divergence: structural expansion is heavily concentrated in the Global South (e.g., Africa and South America), driven by commodity frontiers, whereas the Global North is characterized by widespread stability or policy-driven contraction. GACED30 thus provides a reliable evidence base for monitoring the changing footprint of global agriculture. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18199675 (Chen et al., 2025).