The Moirai are the Greek fates, and this software was named Moirai to represent the fundamental influence of land data inputs on model outcomes. The primary function of the Moirai LDS is to combine spatially explicit input data (e.g., raster images) with tabular input data (e.g., crop price table) to generate tabular output data for a suite of variables. Some of these outputs replace the data provide by the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP), and other data replace and augment the original GCAM GIS processing. The Moirai LDS output data are aggregated by Geographic Land Unit (GLU)2 within each country. The GLU coverage is an input to the Moirai LDS (as a thematic raster image and an associated CSV file that maps the thematic integers to names), and the GLU boundaries can be determined arbitrarily. Previous versions of GCAM (and Moirai LDS) used only bioclimatic Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZs) and corresponding data that were provided by GTAP, as the GLUs. As a result, some AEZ terminology still exists in the code, but this terminology now refers more generally to GLUs. The Moirai LDS now enables any set of boundaries to be used as GLUs (including AEZs), allowing for more flexible generation of land use region boundaries (defined as the intersection of GLUs with geopolitical regions). The current default set of GLUs is the same set of 235 global watersheds as used by the GCAM water module. The GCAM 5.1 geopolitical regions (32 or 14) are included and used as inputs to Moirai to generate a mapping file between the Moirai outputs, which are at the level of the intersection between the GLUs and the country boundaries, and the geopolitical regions. The diagnostics scripts use this geopolitical region mapping in some cases. Moirai can also recalibrate three of the outputs (crop production, harvested area, and land rent) to a specified year that is the center of a five-year averaging window. No recalibration retains the circa 2000, 7-year average of the source data. The currency-year for land rent can also be specified, and the default is 2001 to match the GTAP data.

Code Repository: https://github.com/JGCRI/moirai