DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.14384070
title: Harmonized IACS inventory

description: 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 19 EU member states with time series up to 17 years. For most members states, only the crop information can be shared. However, for six member states also the farm identifier (Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Portugal and Spain) and for five also the organic management information (Austria, Flanders in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, and Bulgaria) can be shared. 

Due to General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), we are not allowed to share all data that we collected and harmonised. We hold GSA data for six additional member states (Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Cyprus) as well as supplementary information on farm-level indicators for 17 additional member states, federal states, or regions (Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Netherlands, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Wallonia in Belgium, Brandenburg, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia in Germany, and Emilia-Romagna, Marche, and Toscana in Italy,) and organic farming information for seven more member states, federal states, or regions (Greece, Netherlands, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, Wallonia in Belgium, and Brandenburg, 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 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. 



The inventory will be updated at least annually. We will update as additional data becomes available and as new versions of the HCAT are released. Moreover, in future versions, we will add new data on information on agri-environmental measures, eco-schemes, and animal numbers per farm.  


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 member state to stay below the file number limitation of Zenodo. Each zip file name indicates the member state, federal state, or region and the years covered. The meaning of the abbreviations of the members states, federal states, and regions 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 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 1.2: 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.