Given the above background, the purpose of this special issue on \"Global Croplands\" was to bring in the best of experts in the field of global croplands-their water use-food security, from around the World, and advance existing knowledge in area of global cropland mapping and link it to green water use (for growing food from rainfed croplands) and blue water use (for growing food from irrigated croplands). The overarching goal of the special issue was to develop a knowledge bank to create a robust system of systems for global agricultural cropland monitoring and it's water use that would lead to an effective geospatial information system on agricultural croplands and its water use, which in turn will contribute to development of a secure food security system for coming decades and this century. The call for the \"global croplands\" special issue resulted in many submissions, careful review, and acceptance of 21 well written articles ([[http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/](http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/)]([http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/](http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/special_issues/)) croplands/) for publication. These articles covered a range of topics on global croplands as well as subjects that are closely linked to croplands such as their water use and food security analysis using geospatial technologies-especially remote sensing that significantly complements and supplements the recent advances reported elsewhere [1-7]. The articles in this special issue fall under the following broad categorization:  
1. Review of global cropland mapping, monitoring, and characterization;
2. Enumeration on data, approaches, and methods of global and local cropland mapping;
3. Development of a framework of global agricultural monitoring system;
4. Crop yield and productivity modeling;
5. Assessment of water use by global croplands;
6. Modeling of global cropland water use;
7. Linking global croplands to water use;
8. Linking global croplands and their water use to food security;
9. Assessing water footprint of crops;
10. Analyzing food security in a changing climate. The collective knowledge base from these articles significantly adds to already existing knowledge on global croplands [1-7] and facilitates us to strategize a world of global food security. A very brief overview of these papers is discussed in the following paragraphs. [PERSON] _et al._ provided a holistic view of global croplands and their water use using remote sensing and non-remote sensing data, approaches, and methods. They do a thorough review of existing global cropland maps and statistics and then provide a country-by-country assessment of global cropland areas and their water use. The paper highlights the linkages between croplands, their water use, and food security at global level. Their review showed that although most cropland studies agreed that there was about 1.5 billion hectares as global cropland areas in year 2000, these studies significantly differ in: (a) precise geographic location of the cropland areas, and (b) proportion of areas under irrigation versus supplemental irrigation versus pure rainfed. These discrepancies can have serious uncertainties in water use modeling. [PERSON] _et al._ provided a comprehensive review of irrigated cropland mapping methods and approaches at local to global levels. They established that the multi-temporal remote sensing data provides the greatest accuracy in irrigated area mapping. Nevertheless, they point out that remote sensing techniques have well established record of accurately mapping and studying irrigated areas only at local scales, but face numerous challenges for mapping over larger areas such as the continents and the globe. Whereas this is true to a great extent, there are substantial advances in large area cropland mapping.