Cropland mask dataset for the Canadian Prairies derived from Google satellite embedding imagery

This article presents a spatially explicit persistent cropland mask for the Canadian prairies covering Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. Data was generated using 64-band embedding data from AlphaEarth with Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) Annual Crop Inventory used for label generation. Stratified-random points from across the prairies were used with a Random Forest classifier to determine cropland and noncropland areas. The trained models were applied across the prairies from 2017 to 2024 in an annual wall-to-wall classification framework at 10 m resolution for each year. Annual classifications were then combined to create a multi-year frequency layer where pixels with more than two years of continuous cropping were labelled as cropland, creating a stable mask layer. The dataset contains a 10 m resolution binary raster mask layer in GeoTIFF format to support a wide range of applications including cropland mapping, land-use change assessment, agricultural monitoring, yield modelling, soil and climate studies, and machine-learning-based geospatial applications. • Annual Prairie-wide cropland mask cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs generated using AlphaEarth data embeddings and Random Forest models trained on stratified random reference samples. • Multi-year cropland frequency and stable cropland mask layers derived from aggregated annual predictions, enabling consistent identification of persistent cropland across the Canadian Prairies.