Gridded dataset of nitrogen and phosphorus point sources from wastewater in Germany (1950-2019)

Publication

Please cite this publication if you use the dataset:

Sarrazin, F. J., Attinger, A., Kumar, R., Gridded dataset of nitrogen and phosphorus point sources from wastewater in Germany (1950-2019), submitted to Earth System Science Data.

Please also refer to the above publication for methodological details.

License

The "Gridded dataset of nitrogen and phosphorus point sources from wastewater in Germany (1950-2019)" is freely available under a  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0), in compliance with the terms of use of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) data and German Cosmetic, Toiletry, Perfumery and Detergent Association (IKW) data that underlie the dataset.

Data description

The dataset includes estimates of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) emissions from wastewater in Germany (1950-2019) at (1) grid level, and at different levels of aggregation, namely (2) at Nomenclature of Territorial units for statistics level 1 (NUTS-1), that correspond to the 16 German federal states (for this, we used the 2020 NUTS classification; BKG, 2020) and (3) at river basin level for 3778 river basins of the HydroBASINS v1.c of the HydroSHEDS database (HydroSHEDS, 2014; Lehner and Grill, 2013). It also includes the input and calibration data (at NUTS-1 and grid level) that were used to estimate the N and P emissions.

1. Input and calibration data at NUTS-1 level:
   spatial extent: Germany
   spatial resolution: NUTS-1
   time period: 1950-2019 (input data), 1987-2019 (calibration data)
   frequency: annual
   variables: input data, calibration data, parameter sample
   file format: CSV
   number of files: 3
   
   

2. Input data at grid level:
   spatial extent: Germany
   spatial resolution: 0.015625°
   time period: 1950-2019 (population data), 2020 (NUTS-1 map)
   frequency: annual
   variables: urban and rural population counts, NUTS-1 map
   file format: netCDF
   number of files: 2
   
   

3. Emission data at grid level:
   spatial extent: Germany
   spatial resolution: 0.015625°
   time period: 1950-2019
   frequency: annual
   variables:
   - N and P wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) outgoing emissions (treated point sources)
   - N and P emissions collected in the public sewer system that are not treated in WWTPs (untreated point sources)
   unit: kg yr-1
   realisations: 200 realisations corresponding to 100 different parameter sets and 2 spatial disaggregation methods for the treated point sources
   file format: netCDF
   number of files: 100
    
4. Emission data aggregated at NUTS-1 (federal state) level:
   spatial extent: Germany
   spatial resolution: NUTS-1
   time period: 1950-2019
   frequency: annual
   variables: 
   - N and P gross emissions
   - N and P total point sources (sum of treated and untreated components)
   - N and P treated point sources (WWTPs outgoing load)
   - N and P untreated point sources (emissions collected in the public sewer system that are not treated in WWTPs)
   - N and P emissions that are removed during treatment in WWTPs
   - N and P emissions lost during wastewater collection and transport
   - N and P emissions applied to agricultural soils in sewage farms
   - N and P emissions that are not collected in the sewer system nor treated in WWTPs
   - N and P incoming WWTPs load
   unit: kg yr-1
   realisations: 100 realisations corresponding to 100 different parameter sets
   file format: CSV
   number of files: 18
    
5. Emission data aggregated at river basin level:
   spatial extent: Germany
   spatial resolution: river basins from the HydroBASINS v1.c of the HydroSHEDS database (HydroSHEDS, 2014; Lehner and Grill, 2013).
   time period: 1950-2019
   frequency: annual
   variables: N and P WWTP outgoing emissions (treated point sources), N and P emissions collected in the public sewer system that are not treated in WWTPs (untreated point sources)
   unit: kg yr-1
   realisations: 200 realisations corresponding to 100 different parameter sets and 2 spatial disaggregation methods for the treated point sources
   file format: CSV
   number of files: 600

Acknowledgements and underlying datasets

Partial support for this work was provided by the Global Water Quality Analysis and Service Platform (GlobeWQ) project financed by the German Ministry for Education and Research (grant number 02WGR1527A). We thank Olaf Büttner for providing the WWTPs data that were collected from the authorities of the German federal states (Büttner et al., 2020). The dataset produced in this work builds on the NUTS map of the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy © GeoBasis-DE/BKG that is under a dl-de/by-2-0 license; the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) dataset available under a CC BY 4.0 license; protein data provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations © FAO provided under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license; detergent data from the German Cosmetic, Toiletry, Perfumery and Detergent Association © IKW (license here); data from the statistical offices of Germany and the federal states and the German and federal state authorities (details on data sources in the publication reported above: Sarrazin et al., submitted to Earth System Science Data); WWTP data available in the Waterbase dataset from the European Environment Agency © EEA under a CC BY 4.0 license. The river basins come from © HydroSHEDS (license here).

Contact

Fanny Sarrazin (fanny.sarrazin@inrae.fr)
Rohini Kumar (rohini.kumar@ufz.de)

References

BKG (Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie) (2020), NUTS regions 1 : 250 000, 31.12.2020, GeoBasis-DE [data set], Leipzig, Germany, https://gdz.bkg.bund.de/index.php/default/nuts-gebiete-1-250-000-stand-31-12-nuts250-31-12.html (last access: 1 November 2022).

Büttner, O. (2020), DE-WWTP - data collection of wastewater treatment plants of Germany (status 2015, metadata), HydroShare [data set],
https://doi.org/10.4211/hs.712c1df62aca4ef29688242eeab7940c.

HydroSHEDS (2014), HydroBASINS v1.c, https://www.hydrosheds.org/products/hydrobasins (last access: 23 October 2023).

Lehner, B. and Grill, G. (2013), Global river hydrography and network routing: baseline data and new approaches to study the world's large river
systems, Hydrological Processes, 27, 2171–2186, https://doi.org/10.1002/hyp.9740.

Changes compared to v1.0 dataset version

Compared to the version 1.0 of the dataset, this version v1.1 contains the input and calibration data at NUTS-1 level and the input data at grid level used to calculate the emissions.