Harmonized IACS inventory

Inventory description

The Harmonized IACS inventory of Europe-LAND is a harmonised 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, and information on organic cultivation.

The inventory contains all data that can be shared following the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) of the data providers. It covers 20 EU member states with time series up to 18 years. For most members states, only the crop information can be shared. However, for seven member states also the farm identifier (Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Tuscany in Italy, Portugal and Spain) and for seven also the organic management information (Austria, Flanders in Belgium, Bulgaria, Czechia, Brandenburg in Germany, Denmark, and Ireland) can be shared. Two member states (Croatia and Lithuania) only provide Land Parcel Identification System data publicly, which are included in the inventory as they differentiate between up to 20 land-use classes.

Due to General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), we are not allowed to share all data that we collected and harmonised. We hold more GSA data for eight additional member states (Italy, Germany, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Poland and Cyprus) as well as supplementary information on farm-level indicators for various additional member states, federal states, or regions (Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Brandenburg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, North-Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia in Germany, and Emilia-Romagna, and Marche in Italy,) and organic farming information for seven more member states, federal states, or regions (Greece, Netherlands, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Wallonia in Belgium, and Lower Saxony, Saarland, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia in Germany). For Luxembourg and Malta, only LPIS data were available. As these datasets contain only reference parcels without detailed land-use information at the parcel level, they were not included in the inventory. 

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

The crop information were harmonised using an extended version of the Hierarchical Crop and Agriculture Taxonomy (HCAT) of the EuroCrops project (Schneider et al., 2023). To allow for interoperability with EuroCrops, the harmonised 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 parcel per member state, state, or region
• farm_id (optional): Unique identifier for each farm per member state, state, or region
• crop_code (mandatory): Original, member state-specific crop code
• crop_name (mandatory): Original, member state-specific crop name
• EC_trans_n (mandatory): Original crop name translated into English
• EC_hcat_n (mandatory): Machine-readable HCAT name of the crop
• EC_hcat_c (mandatory): The 10-digit HCAT code indicating the hierarchy of the crop
• organic (optional): Whether a parcel was conventional (0), organic (1), or is in the conversion process to organic cultivation (2)
• field_size (mandatory): Size of parcel/reference parcel in hectares
• crop_area (optional): Area in hectares of the main crop reported in crop column. The crop_area column only occurs if multiple crops are reported per reference parcel.

More detailed information for all members states in our harmonised inventory can also be found in the documentation. 

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. 

• 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

For Catalonia in Spain, we provide an additional time series from 2015-2024 separately.

Changelog

Version 1.3: 

New regions covered:
- Baden-Wuerttemberg with data from 2022 (crop info)
- Bulgaria with data from 2014-2025 (crop info)
- Tuscany, Italy with data from 2016-2023 (crop info, farm ids)
- Wallonia, Belgium with data from 2015-2023 (only crop info)
 
Time series extended:
- Austria (+2025), Flanders, Belgium (+2025), Czechia (+2024, 2025), Denmark (+2025), Estonia (+2024), Finland (+2024, 2025), France (+2024), Germany-Brandenburg (+2025), Germany-Lower-Saxony (+2025), Germany-North-Rhine-Westphalia (+2025), Ireland (+2024), Lithuania (+2025 LPIS data), Netherlands (+2025), Portugal (+2025), Slovakia (+2024, 2025), Slovenia (+2024, 2025), Sweden (+2024)
 
Classification refinements:
- Mixed classes were introduced in the classification scheme to differentiate between pure classes and mixed classes, e.g. cereal-legume mixes, crops with undersowing, pastures with trees etc.
- Missing crop and land-use classes, such as agroforestry, landscape elements, sugar cane and many others were newly added to capture as many as possible different land-uses
- Existing classes were refined by adding more subclasses, such as greenhouses (to differentiate between different crops) and potatoes (to differentiate between growing seasons)
 
Corrections of translation and classification errors:
- Using LLMs we checked all crop name translations and the classification into HCAT classes and corrected where necessary

Corrections of geodata:
- Removed features with no geometry
- Removed duplicate features
- Made sure all crops of field blocks were reported (concerns Ireland)
- Made field-IDs truly unique

For more details on this please refer to the github page and the documentation file.

Version 1.2: In this version, we have corrected the inventory description and documentation to only refer to data that we share publicly. Additionally, we corrected an error in the Spanish data, where the crop_code column got mixed up during pre-processing. This did not affect the other columns, which were correct. Moreover, we have uploaded new data for Bulgaria to the inventory. 

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.