Crop sequence typology dataset for North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (2019–2025)

This article presents a dataset of a crop sequence typology for the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It provides the sequence of crop classes over the period 2019-2025 at the field level and applies an existing crop sequence typology. The latter classifies sequences into different levels of structural diversity (number of crops and number of transitions) and functional diversity (share of spring-sown crops and share of leaf crops). The typology encompasses 939,623 ha of land, accounting for 87.72% of the arable and 62.59% of the total agricultural land in the state. The dataset is based on data from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS), which is used to manage subsidies for farmers under EU policies. The original IACS data is publicly available, and the code for estimating the typology is available on GitHub, allowing easy updating of the dataset when additional years become available and for transferring it to other regions. The dataset is provided in a vector format (GeoParquet, WGS84) in a single file. It is valuable to assess crop sequence diversity and link it to ex-ante and ex-post assessment of agri-environmental policies across various scales.

Funding acknowledgement

BrightSpace & LAMASUS are funded by the European Union, Horizon Europe Grant Agreement Number BrightSpace 101060075 and LAMASUS 101060423. Views are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

UK Research and Innovation Project Code: 10047415 https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=10047415 

Citation

Kuhn, T., Pahmeyer, P., Storm, H. (2026): Crop sequence typology dataset for North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany (2019–2025). Discussion paper, 10.5281/zenodo.18745464.

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Project information

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LAMASUS https://www.lamasus.eu