A comprehensive dataset of vegetation states, fluxes of matter and energy, weather, agricultural management, and soil properties from intensively monitored crop sites in Western Germany

Abstract. The development and validation of hydroecological land-surface models to simulate agricultural areas requires extensive data on weather, soil properties, agricultural management, and vegetation states and fluxes. However, this comprehensive data is rarely available since measurement, quality control, documentation and compilation of the different data types is costly in terms of time and money. Here, we present a comprehensive dataset, which was collected at four agricultural sites within the Rur catchment in Western Germany in the frame of the Transregional Collaborative Research Centre 32 “Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Systems: Monitoring, Modelling and Data Assimilation” (TR32). Vegetation-related data comprises fresh and dry biomass (green and brown, predominantly per organ), plant height, green and brown leaf area index, phenological development state, nitrogen and carbon content (overall > 17 000 entries), and fluxes of carbon, energy, and water (> 180 000 half-hourly records) for a variety of agricultural plants. In addition, masses of harvest residues and regrowth of vegetation after harvest or before planting of the main crop are included (> 250 entries). Data on agricultural management includes sowing and harvest dates, and information on cultivation, fertilization and agrochemicals (27 management periods). The dataset also includes gap-filled weather data (> 200 000 hourly records) and soil parameters (particle size distributions, carbon and nitrogen contents; > 800 records). This data can also be useful for development and validation of remote sensing products. The dataset (Reichenau et al., 2019) is hosted at the TR32 database ( https://www.tr32db.uni-koeln.de/data.php?dataID=1886 ).