Harmonized IACS inventory

Inventory description

The Harmonized IACS inventory of Europe-LAND is a harmonized collection of data from the Geospatial Aid (GSA) system of the Integrated Control and Administration System (IACS), which manages and controls agricultural subsidies in the European Union (EU). The GSA data are a unique data source with field-levels of land use information that are annually generated. The data carry information on crops grown per field, a unique identifier of the subsidy applicants that allows to aggregate fields to farms, information on organic cultivation and animal numbers per farm.

Due to General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), we are not allowed to share all data that we collected and harmonized. Therefore, there are two versions of the inventory, a public version and an internal version. The internal version contains more information and covers more countries and years. 

The public version contains all data that can be shared following the GDPR of the data providers. It covers 18 countries with time series up to 18 years. For most countries, only the crop information can be shared. However, for 6 countries also the applicant identifier (Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) and for four also the organic management information (Austria, Flanders - Belgium, Denmark, Ireland) can be shared .

If you use the data, please also cite the original sources of the data. You can find the references in the provided documentation that is in the "_Documentation.zip".

The crop information were harmonized using the Hierarchical Crop and Agriculture Taxonomy (HCAT) of the EuroCrops project (Schneider et al., 2023). To allow for interoperability with EuroCrops, the harmonized Europe-LAND data come with the same column names that relate to the crop information. All crop mapping tables can be found in our GitHub repository.

Column names:

• field_id (mandatory): Unique identifier for each field per country, state or region
• farm_id (optional): Unique identifier for each applicant per country, state, or region
• crop_code (mandatory): The original, country-specific crop code
• crop_name (mandatory): The original, country-specific crop name
• EC_trans_n (mandatory): The original crop name translated into English
• EC_hcat_n (mandatory): The machine-readable HCAT name of the crop
• EC_hcat_c (mandatory): The 10-digit HCAT code indicating the hierarchy of the crop
• organic (optional): Indicates whether a field is conventionally managed, is in conversion to organic cultivation or is organically cultivated. Values: [0,1,2]
• field_size (mandatory): Size of field in hectares
• crop_area (optional): Area in hectares of crop reported in crop column. This occurs only if multiple crops are reported per parcel and refers to the area of the main crop.

More detailed information for all countries in our harmonized inventory (including those that are not publicly available) can also be found in the documentation.

The inventory will be updated at least annually. In future versions, we will add a new crop classification, harmonized animal data, and harmonized agri-environmental measures/eco-schemes.

Information on data provision

All files come as .geoparquets to stay within the space limitations of Zenodo. Geoparquets can simply be opened in QGIS via drag and drop. Additionally, various libraries from different porgramming languages are able to handle geoparquets, e.g. geoarrow and sgarrwo in R, GDAL/OGR in C++, GeoParquet.jl in Julia or Fiona in Python.

We bundled multiple years of each country to stay below the file number limitation of Zenodo. Each zip file name indicates the country, region, or federal state and the years covered. The meaning of the abbreviations of the countries, regions, and federal states can be found in the "country_region_codes.xlsx" in the "_Documentation.zip". 

The Spanish data are also bundled across regions, as they are separated into more than 50 regions. See the country_regions_codes.xlsx tables for the meaning of the abbreviations:

• ES_Bundle1 (Northeast): BAL, BAR, CAS, GIR, HEC, LLE, NAV, TAR, TER, ZAR
• ES_Bundel2 (Northwest): ACO, ALA, AST, BUR, CAN, GUI, LEO, LRI, LUG, OUR, PAL, PON, VIZ, VLD, ZAM
• ES_Bundle3 (West): ALB, AVI, CAC, CIU, CUE, GUA, MAD, SAL, SEG, SOR, TOL
• ES_Bundle4 (Southwest): ALI, ALM, BAD, CAD, CDB, GRA, HEV, JAE, LAP, MAL, MUR, SAN, SEV, VLC

Changelog

Version 1.1: In this version, we corrected some data errors that occured in v1 due to a failure of our quality checks. First, not all fields got classified in v1, and secondly, there were two different datatypes in the EC_hcat_c in many files. Both errors are now corrected.