A brief closing statement. Not only have agricultural experiments been conducted on the site since 1843, but some of these experiments have continued right up to the present day. The world-famous Classical Experiments conducted in the fields at Rothamsted are a unique inheritance from the earliest days of agricultural science, continuing from the dawn of the industrial revolution to the present day. Such long runs of data records are increasingly in demand to help answer questions concerning issues like global climatic change and nitrate leaching. Unfortunately, only a small part of the data from the Classical Experiments are available in an electronically readable form.
Most data exist in published or unpublished papers, archives, notebooks or on data sheets.
Users from Rothamsted and elsewhere will then not only have easy access to the data, but have specialist information available to them as well. ERA can be used to archive contemporary data as well.