County-Level Agricultural Irrigation and Fertilizer Data for China

NASA Earthdata hosts the China County Data Collection, compiled by SCIOPS for the DNDC model at UNH. The Agricultural Management Dataset provides two variables for China's counties in 1990: irrigation index and nitrogen fertilizer application. This dataset is part of a seven-dataset collection focused on agricultural ecosystem inputs.

Use Cases

• Model county-level nitrogen application rates using the Nitrogen Fertilizer column to estimate environmental impacts.
• Analyze the correlation between the Irrigation Index and regional water resource management strategies.
• Integrate irrigation and fertilizer data with other collection datasets like Crops or Soil Properties for comprehensive DNDC model simulations.
• Study spatial patterns of agricultural input intensity across Chinese counties for the baseline year 1990.

Strengths

• Data is compiled at a consistent administrative scale for all of China's counties.
• Provides two specific, model-ready variables: Irrigation Index and Nitrogen Fertilizer.

Limitations

• Data is from a single year (1990) and is temporally stale for contemporary analysis.
• The dataset excludes rice paddies from its irrigation calculations, which may bias results in rice-growing regions.
• Underlying source methodologies and potential compilation errors are not detailed.

Provenance

Source

SCIOPS, compiled from multiple Chinese sources for the University of New Hampshire (UNH).

Collection Method

Compiled from multiple Chinese statistical sources at the county scale.

Time Range

1990

Freshness

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Geography

China, at the county administrative level.