The GEOGLAM Crop Monitor Sub-National Crop Calendars are based on a combination of the best available data from different international agencies, national ministries, and expert knowledge of the country partners from GEOGLAM Crop Monitors. The crops covered are wheat, maize, rice, soybeans, sorghum, millet, beans, and teff. In locations where there are multiple cropping seasons, the seasons are numbered with the first being the largest producing season followed by the next largest, and so on. The crop calendars consist of five different phenological stages which are broadly applicable across most crops; Planting through Early Vegetative, Vegetative through Reproductive, Ripening through Harvest, End of Harvest, and Out of Season. The sub-national regions were built using the administrative level 1 FAO GAUL units as the basic building blocks since crop production statistics are typically readily available for most countries at this level and the crop calendars were designed to link crop conditions to potential yield and production within the GEOGLAM Crop Monitors. Agroecological zones, subnational statistics, and national partner inputs were then used to inform the formation process. This was done so that areas with similar phenological development timelines were grouped, >90% of national production was captured in the calendars, and the national production was relatively distributed among the sub-national regions, accounting for the multiple crops monitored per country. To provide a finer temporal detailed product, the crop calendars are displayed in bi-monthly steps.

The primary use of this dataset is for underpinning EO-based, global, crop-specific condition monitoring through the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor activities. Therefore, the countries and crops of focus are based upon the needs of the GEOGLAM Crop Monitors. The data is already being operationally used within the GEOGLAM Crop Monitor Reports (Crop Monitor for AMIS, Crop Monitor for Early Warning, and the Global Crop Monitor). The readme file contains the description of the shapefile columns and the names of the crop seasons if multiple seasons exist for a country. Version 1 includes all the countries and crops from the Crop Monitor for Early Warning. Updates will be made as necessary. A future version will include the countries and crops from the Crop Monitor for AMIS and the Global Crop Monitor.