MapSPAM / SPAM 2020 v2 (IFPRI / CGIAR)
42 crops mapped by area, yield, and production — rainfed vs. irrigated, at 10km globally.
What this is
MapSPAM distributes national agricultural statistics into spatial grids using a cross-entropy model. The 2020 v2 release covers 42 crops by harvested area, physical area, production, and yield for rainfed and irrigated portions. Global at 5-arcmin (~10km). Available via mapspam.info and Harvard Dataverse. License CC-BY-4.0. Note: MapSPAM is a statistical disaggregation model — it takes what countries officially reported producing, and allocates that production spatially based on suitability surfaces and agricultural intensity maps. It does not measure what was actually grown on any given field; it is a spatially-explicit census table, not a satellite observation.
Why we surface it
Census tables say a country grows X million tonnes of maize. MapSPAM answers where, and how much is irrigated. That spatial distribution is what most ag analysis needs, and it's not derivable from remote sensing alone.
What you can do with it
Shown for commercial use. Personal, research, and nonprofit use is often more permissive — switch the verdict lens on the catalog.
- Internal / individual use
- Free to use for any purpose, including commercial and AI training. Nothing's triggered until you share it.
- Redistribute the data
- Fine to use and redistribute, including commercially. One string attached: credit the original source wherever it shows up.
- Republish a derivative
- Build on it and republish freely, commercial or not. You must credit the original source in what you ship.
- Build into a private product
- Fine to build into a closed or commercial product. Attribution is still owed wherever the data is actually exposed to users.
This decoder is a starting point, not legal advice. For commercial deployment, run the actual license terms past someone who reads them for a living.
○ Planned
Not in the map yet — this source is on the V1 backlog. Schema, sample, and citation slots fill in once the layer ships.
Related — same domain
- USDA NASS Crop Sequence Boundaries (CSB)Public domain
- USDA NASS Cropland Data Layer (CDL)Public domain
- LGRIP30 — Landsat-Derived Global Rainfed and Irrigated-Cropland Product (NASA LP DAAC)CC0 (NASA LP DAAC — no copyright restriction; attribution encouraged)
- ESA WorldCereal 10m (ESA Consortium)CC-BY-4.0