A global dataset for crop production under conventional tillage and no tillage systems

Benoit Gabrielle,David Makowski,Yang Su

doi:10.1038/s41597-021-00817-x

Abstract

No tillage (NT) is often presented as a means to grow crops with positive environmental externalities, such as enhanced carbon sequestration, improved soil quality, reduced soil erosion, and increased biodiversity. However, whether NT systems are as productive as those relying on conventional tillage (CT) is a controversial issue, fraught by a high variability over time and space. Here, we expand existing datasets to include the results of the most recent field experiments, and we produce a global dataset comparing the crop yields obtained under CT and NT systems. In addition to crop yield, our dataset also reports information on crop growing season, management practices, soil characteristics and key climate parameters throughout the experimental year. The final dataset contains 4403 paired yield observations between 1980 and 2017 for eight major staple crops in 50 countries. This dataset can help to gain insight into the main drivers explaining the variability of the productivity of NT and the consequence of its adoption on crop yields.

Highlights

Background & SummaryOften featured among promising climate change mitigation measures, No tillage (NT) systems, including conservation agriculture (CA), contribute to environmental preservation and sustainable agricultural production[1,2]
Besides soil characteristics and information on management practices, we report a large range of climate variables derived from several external databases
After these screening and selection steps, all relevant data were manually extracted from the selected papers, including general information about the paper, location and year of the experiment, the number of years under NT when the crop was sown, soil characteristics, crop growing season, crop type, crop management practices and crop yield of conventional tillage (CT) and NT

Summary

Introduction

Background & SummaryOften featured among promising climate change mitigation measures, NT systems, including conservation agriculture (CA), contribute to environmental preservation and sustainable agricultural production[1,2]. Some of these studies relied on global datasets including results of field experiments comparing NT and CT cropping systems over a large range of soil and climate conditions. These datasets do not include the most recent published experiments, and provide no or limited information on soil characteristics, climate variables, and management practices.

Results

Conclusion