This dataset consists of 30 m spatial resolution arable land and permanent agriculture maps for Southern Greece for the period 1986-2020. For this dataset, arable lands are defined as areas where seasonal crops are planted and are typically harvested and tilled at least once a year. Arable land includes cereal crops, root crops, non-permanent industrial crops, dry pulses, vegetables and flowers, and fodder crops. Permanent agriculture is defined as areas with permanent crops including fruit trees, olive groves and vineyards. Mapped regions include Attica, the Peloponnese peninsula, and Crete. Ground observations derived from the European Union statistical office (EUROSTAT) Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS) and Landsat spectral-temporal metrics were used to train a Random Forest classifier, which was used to classify arable land and permanent agriculture at annual time steps. A post-processing step was taken to reduce spurious landcover class transitions using a Hidden Markov Model that accounts for landcover class transition likelihoods and annual class membership likelihoods.

The data is distributed in two zip files containing 35, 13128 x 19469 pixel files, each representing a single year in the 1986-2020 time series. Files are in GeoTiff format using a geographic coordinate system (Latitude and Longitude) based on the World Geodetic System (WGS84) reference ellipsoid. Spatial resolution is 0.00026° per pixel (approximately 30 m). Filename convention is as follows: Landcover_4classes_YYYY.tif, where YYYY is the map year. Each pixel is classified as one of the following classes: 1 - Arable land2 - Permanent agriculture3 - Natural vegetation (herbaceous, shrubland, forest)4 - Other (artificial surfaces, bare ground, inland water)Further information on classes and mapping methodology can be found in the referenced article.