This dataset has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 42201263), the National Key Research and Development Program of China on Global Change (No. 2017YFA0603304), the Major Program of Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education of China (Study on the Evolution of Ecosystem Pattern, Problem Diagnosis, and Governance Model of the Yellow River Basin; Study on Evolution of Man-land Relationship and Its Ecoenvironmental Effects in Floodplain of the Lower Yellow River), the 2021 Henan key R & D and promotion project (Soft Science) (212400410256).

We developed a new gridding allocation model for croplands with unequal weight factors and reconstructed 58 time-point cropland cover maps at a 10-km resolution for the past millennium in the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in China. The cropland dataset can be used to model past climate change, estimate carbon emissions, assess human-activity-induced ecological effects, and improve global historical land use scenarios.