Advances in the representation of suitability and protection in global land data systems.

Some of the important factors that drive land use change decisions are suitability (land that is suitable for agricultural expansion) and protection (land that is available for expansion). Thus, it is important for land data systems to effectively represent suitability and protection when accounting for land.The Moirai land data system is designed to produce historical land data inputs for different modeling platforms including the agriculture and land use module of the Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) data system. The primary function of Moirai is to combine spatially explicit raster data with tabular input data to generate easily interpretable tabular output data. Moirai tracks data for different land types, within different vegetation types within specific GLUs of different countries. Moirai also keeps track of whether the footprint of a land cell is protected or unprotected. Recent Moirai developments account for a representation of protected areas based on their suitability (i.e. whether a piece of land is suitable for agricultural expansion) and only specifies if a piece of land is protected or not using a binary thematic raster. Our current work will now output a much more detailed representation of suitability and protection and will track 7 different categories of protection and suitability within the different land and vegetation types that add more flexibility to accommodate research needs.