EuroCrops: All you need to know about the Largest Harmonised Open Crop Dataset Across the European Union

TL;DR

EuroCrops is a comprehensive, publicly available dataset of geo-referenced agricultural polygons and crop information across 16 EU countries, derived from farmer declarations and organized into a hierarchical taxonomy.

Contribution

This paper introduces EuroCrops, the largest harmonized open crop dataset for the EU, with standardized crop classes and geo-referenced data from 16 countries.

Findings

Contains detailed crop polygons and species data

Standardized crop taxonomy across multiple countries

Supports research and policy-making in agriculture

Abstract

EuroCrops contains geo-referenced polygons of agricultural croplands from 16 countries of the European Union (EU) as well as information on the respective crop species grown there. These semantic annotations are derived from self-declarations by farmers receiving subsidies under the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) of the European Commission (EC). Over the last 1.5 years, the individual national crop datasets have been manually collected, the crop classes have been translated into the English language and transferred into the newly developed Hierarchical Crop and Agriculture Taxonomy (HCAT). EuroCrops is publicly available under continuous improvement through an active user community.