Plant heights of Brassica, Maize, Millet, Pea, Rice, Soybean, Sugarbeet, Sunflower, and Wheat compiled from the USDA National Plant Germplasm System

This zenodo record contains data accompanying the paper "Canopy temperatures in computationally expensive crop models: a resource-efficient emulator approach applied in LPJmL (version 5.9.18)" submitted to GMD (Hemmen et al., 2025).

The data are used in this study, in which an emulator approach is developed to simulate canopy temperatures in global crop models. For the derivation of the emulators, as well as for the usage of the emulators themselves, maximum crop heights are needed. Mean maximum plant heights of Brassica, Maize, Millet, Pea, Rice, Soybean, Sugarbeet, Sunflower, and Wheat were computed from plant height values provided by the GRIN-Global database. All data listed here was downloaded from the USDA National Plant Germplasm System (National Plant Germplasm System, United States Department of Agriculture - Agricultural Research Service: GRIN-Global, https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/search, 2025, last accessed March 2026; Byrne, P. F., Volk, G. M., Gardner, C., Gore, M. A., Simon, P. W., & Smith, S.: Sustaining the future of plant breeding: The critical role of the USDA‐ARS National Plant Germplasm System, Crop Science, 58(2), 451-468, https://doi.org/10.2135/cropsci2017.05.0303, 2018). 

The column names and units of the values in the respective files used in the study are as follows:

Brassica: PLANT HEIGHT [cm]

Maize: PLANT HEIGHT [cm]

Millet: PLANT HEIGHT [dm]

Pea: PLANT HEIGHT, FINAL [cm]

Rice: observation_value; 1 ≙ 80-89 cm, 2 ≙ 90-99 cm, 3 ≙ 100-109 cm, 4 ≙ 110-119 cm, 5 ≙ 120-129 cm, 6 ≙ 130-139 cm, 7≙ 140-149 cm, 8 ≙ 150-159 cm, 9 ≙ 160 cm or more

Soybean: HEIGHT [cm]

Sugarbeet: HEIGHT MAXIMUM [cm]

Sunflower: MAXIMUM PLANT HEIGHT [cm]

Wheat: VALUE [cm]

The dataset provided in this zenodo record is released for use under the CC-BY licence. A summary of the licence is provided under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The full legal code is provided under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.