Catchment-scale, 5-year means hydro-climatic, edaphic, agricultural and nutrient efficiency data in the United States

Anna Scaini, Giulia Vico, Josefin Thorslund, Gustaf Hugelius, Stefano Manzoni

This dataset comprises 5-year means of various hydro-climatic, edaphic and agricultural data aggregated at catchment-scale, in 110 catchments in the conterminous US for non-overlapping 5-year periods between 1988 and 2012. The data are in form of a table with each row indicating a catchment, based on the Global Runoff Data Centre (GRDC) code, and columns indicating each type of data.

We prepared this dataset to quantify how combined hydrological processes, agricultural practices and edaphic conditions affect nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) use efficiencies, as well as their ratio, at the catchment scale. Improving nutrient conversion to harvestable products is a global priority, needed for food security and to reduce eutrophication and greenhouse gases, and the role of hydrological conditions in understanding nutrient cycling in catchments with substantial agricultural area has been mostly overlooked.

The data were generated by aggregating different datasets of agricultural variables, mostly obtained from county-scale United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Quickstats dataset, with raster precipitation and temperature data (from the dataset CRU TS version 4.03, by the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia), catchment-scale runoff (from GRDC) and edaphic data (Soil property and class maps of the Conterminous United States at 100-meter spatial resolution).

Citation

Anna Scaini, Giulia Vico, Josefin Thorslund, Gustaf Hugelius, Stefano Manzoni (2023) Catchment-scale, 5-year means hydro-climatic, edaphic, agricultural and nutrient efficiency data in the United States. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/scaini-2023-catchment-1

References

Scaini A, Vico G, Thorslund J, Hugelius G, Manzoni S (2022) Water availability and land management control catchment-scale agricultural nitrogen and phosphorous use efficiencies. Global Biogeochemical Cycles. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GB007487

Data description

The data are provided in one comma-separated values (csv) file that includes the 5-year means of hydro-climatic, edaphic and agricultural data of 110 catchments in the conterminous US.

There is also a separate csv file that provides a summary of the structure of the data file, including the explanation of each column heading and units. Character set: Unicode (UTF-8).

Comments

The aggregation process was done clipping the raster/shapefile data over shapefiles of the catchments in Rstudio, using different procedure depending on the type of dataset (e.g., raster or county-scale shapefiles), and averaged every 5-year between 1988 and 2012, e.g., 1988⁠ – ⁠1992, 1993⁠ – ⁠1997, etc. See Scaini et al. (2022) for further explanation.

Please, cite the publication by Scaini et al. (2022) when using this dataset. The lead author would also welcome to receive a notification when the data are used for any research project or publication.