Provision of metadata of European agricultural long-term experiments through BonaRes and EJP SOIL collaboration

Cenk Donmez; Guillaume Blanchy; Nikolai Svoboda; Tommy D'Hose; Carsten Hoffmann; Wilfried Hierold; Katja Klumpp

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2022.108226

Provision of metadata of European agricultural long-term experiments through BonaRes and EJP SOIL collaboration

Data Brief. 2022 Apr 29:42:108226. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2022.108226. eCollection 2022 Jun.

Authors

Cenk Donmez^{1

2}, Guillaume Blanchy³, Nikolai Svoboda¹, Tommy D'Hose³, Carsten Hoffmann¹, Wilfried Hierold¹, Katja Klumpp⁴

Affiliations

¹ Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Muencheberg 15374, Germany.
² Cukurova University, Landscape Architecture Department, Remote Sensing and GIS Lab, 01330 Adana, Turkey.
³ Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (ILVO), Melle 9090, Belgium.
⁴ Institut National de Recherche Pour l'agriculture, l'alimentation et l'environnement (INRAE), Grassland Ecosystem Research Unit, Clermont Ferrand 63000, France.

Abstract

Agricultural Long-Term Experiments (LTEs) are crucial agricultural research infrastructures for monitoring the long term effects of management and environment on crop production and soil resources. We have compiled the meta-information of 616 LTEs from 30 different countries across Europe with a duration of typically 20 years, including clustered information of the European LTEs in different categories (management operations, land use, duration, status, etc.). It consists of the updated version of the dataset published by Grosse et al., (2020) but is extended by further LTE metadata, categories and research themes. Each set of metadata consists of up to 49 different attributes (categorical or numeric). Collected attributes were analyzed according to several research themes, including fertilization, crop rotation and tillage treatments. The collection of individual metadata was enlarged by the recent agreement between the BonaRes (www.bonares.de) and EJP SOIL (www.ejpsoil.eu) groups into the most comprehensive dataset in Europe, providing access to LTE and other, shorter running experiments. This dataset centralized past and existing information usually dispersed across several national actors. As such, it provides an extensive database that can be used by decision-makers, scientists, LTE owners and the public. The dataset can be updated in the future to foster networking and information exchange continuously.

Keywords: Agriculture; BonaRes; EJP SOIL; Europe; FAIR data principles; LTE; Long-term experiments.