Tillage is a central element in agricultural soil management and has direct and indirect effects on processes in the biosphere. Effects of agricultural soil management can be assessed by soil, crop, and ecosystem models but global assessments are hampered by lack of information on type and spatial distribution. This dataset is the result of a study on global classification of tillage practices and the spatially explicit mapping of crop-specific tillage systems for around the year 2005. This global gridded tillage system data set is dedicated to modeling communities interested in the quantitative assessment of biophysical and biogeochemical impacts of land use and soil management on cropland. The data set is complemented by the publication of the R- code and can be used for reproducing and build upon for scenarios including the expansion of sustainable soil management practices as Conservation Agriculture (Porwollik et al. 2018, http://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2018.013). Both, the data set and the R-code are described in detail in Porwollik et al. (2018, ESSD). We present the mapping result of six tillage systems for 42 crop types and potential suitable Conservation Agriculture area as the following variables: We present the mapping result of six tillage systems for 42 crop types and potentially suitable Conservation Agriculture area as variables:1 = conventional annual tillage2 = traditional annual tillage3 = reduced tillage4 = Conservation Agriculture5 = rotational tillage6 = traditional rotational tillage7 = potential suitable Conservation Agriculture area Reference system: WGS84Geographic extent: Longitude (min, max) (-180, 180), Latitude (min, max) (-56, 84)Resolution: 5 arc-minutesTime period covered: around the year 2005Type: NetCDF Dataset sources (with indication of reference): 1. Grid cell allocation key to country: IFPRI/IIASA (2017, cell5m_allockey_xy.dbf.zip)2. Crop-specific physical cropland: IFPRI/IIASA (2017, spam2005v3r1_global_phys_area.geotiff.zip)3. SoilGrids depth to bedrock: Hengl et al. (2014)4. Aridity index: FAO (2015)5. Conservation Agriculture area: FAO (2016)6. Income level: World Bank (2017)7. Field size: Fritz et al. (2015)8. Water erosion: Nachtergaele et al. (2011)

This tillage dataset is made available under the Open Database License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/dbcl/1.0/.