EuroCrops: Harmonized Crop Reporting Data from EU Countries

EuroCrops combines publicly available self-declared crop reporting datasets from multiple European Union countries. The collection is harmonized using a Hierarchical Crop and Agriculture Taxonomy (HCAT) to unify original crop names into a machine-readable format. Maja Schneider from the Technical University of Munich leads the project, which includes data from countries such as Austria, Germany, France, and Spain.

Use Cases

• Analyzing regional crop distribution patterns based on harmonized HCAT codes and names.
• Training land cover classification models using self-declared crop reporting polygons.
• Studying agricultural policy impacts across EU member states based on unified crop taxonomies.
• Mapping specific crop types (e.g., cereals) across European geographies using the provided shapefiles.

Strengths

• Data is harmonized across multiple EU countries using a dedicated Hierarchical Crop and Agriculture Taxonomy (HCAT).
• The dataset includes contributions from at least 16 listed European countries, providing broad geographic coverage.
• The project maintains a versioned changelog documenting updates and fixes to the taxonomy and data mappings.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Technical University of Munich (Maja Schneider), via paperswithcode.

Collection Method

Combination and harmonization of publicly available self-declared crop reporting datasets from EU countries.

Geography

European Union (specifically listed countries including Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Spain, France, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia)