Europe-LAND - Harmonized IACS Inventory

The Harmonized IACS inventory of Europe-LAND is a harmonized 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, information on organic cultivation and animal numbers per farm. The Europe-LAND project is funded by the EU within Horizon Europa (Grant Agreement No. 101081307). Disclaimer: If you use the harmonized data, please also cite the original sources of the data.

This repository comes along with the inventory and contains all scripts that were written

1. to obtain and preprocess the data and
2. a workflow to harmonize the data across the European Union

The crop information were harmonized using the Hierarchical Crop and Agriculture Taxonomy (HCAT) of the EuroCrops project.

Workflow

All pre-processing scripts can be found in the "pre_processing" folder. These scripts are country specific and prepare the data for the workflow. The harmonization workflow is indicated with the letters a - d. We provide a diagramm of our the project structure below and tables we created for the harmonization to exemplify the workflow.

1. Script a is a simple script to list all columns found in the vector data and provide an example of an attribute.
2. Manual work: After that the user has to create a column name translation table (xlsx) that assigns all the original columns to the harmonized column names per year.
3. These tables are needed for script b1 that lists all available crop code - crop name combinations found in the vector data. It then translates all crop names to English and German. If the EuroCrops project already provided a mapping table to their classes, the script matches the new table to their classification.
4. Script b2 is optional. It matches a table of unclassified crops with all already created HCAT crop classifications. For that, we use a string matching algorithm with the Jaro-Winkler metric. The matching is perfomed on the translated crop names to English. However, the user still has to verify the matches manually, but the workload is drastically reduced, if there is no existing EuroCrops classification.
5. Manual work: Then, the user has to manually fill the gaps that are still existent in the crop classification tables.
6. Scripts c1 and c2 are optional. They can be used to explore the unmaintained and not_known_and_other HCAT classes and to verify our version of the HCAT with a new version of the HCAT.
7. Script c3 uses the manually generated classification table and the column name translation tables to harmonize the crop codes and the column names.
8. Script d1 prepares information on the harmonized data and the classifications.
9. Script d3 prepares the data for publication (e.g. removes information that cannot be shared).

We provide all column name translation tables and crop classification tables that we created in the tables folder . If you find errors, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Project setup for replication

├── data 
│    └── tables
│    │     └── column_name_translations
│    │     └── column_names
│    │     └── crop_classifications
│    │     └── crop_names
│    │     └── statistics
│    └── vector
│          └── IACS
│          └── IACS_EU_Land
├── figures
├── scripts