The national land resource database (AR) classifies the land cover of mainland Norway according to its suitability for agriculture and natural plant production. National land resource datasets are available at scale 1:5.000 (AR5), 1:50.000 (AR50) and 1:250.000 (AR250).

Arable land is a valid land resource attribute for certain classes of land types derived from the dataset AR5. These land types are pasture, forest, open land and marshland (peat bog). The land types have to fulfill requirements for soil quality and climate for plant production.

Features in the dataset Arable land are continuous areas with the same attributes assigned according to the classification criteria of AR5 with a geometric representation as polygons. The dataset is updated annually.

Arable land data are updated annually with data on from the land resource map in scale 1:5.000. This ensures that arable land are an attribute to current pasture, forest, open land and peat bog and not an attribute to previous land types of these sorts.