Landscape in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in China has un-dergone significant changes for thousands of years due to agricultural expansion.Lack of reliable long-term and high-resolution historical cropland data has limited our ability in un-derstanding and quantifying human impacts on regional climate change,carbon and water cycles.In this study,we used a data-driven modeling framework that combined multiple sources of data(historical provincial cropland area,historical coastlines,and satellite da-ta-based maximum cropland extent)with a new gridding allocation model for croplands dis-tribution to reconstruct a historical cropland dataset for the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River at a 10-km resolution for 58 time points ranging from the period 1000 to 1999.The cropland area in the study area increased by 2.3 times from 21.87 million ha in 1000 to 50.64 million ha in 1999.Before 1393,the area of cropland increased slowly and was pri-marily concentrated in the Weihe and Fenhe plains.From 1393-1820,the area of cropland increased rapidly,particularly on the North China Plain.Since 1820,cropland cover has tended to become saturated.Our newly reconstructed results agreed well with remotely sensed data as well as historical document-based facts regarding cropland distribution.
