Farm management and vegetation plot data from paired organic and conventional farms in England, 2000-2004

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Environmental Information Data Centre
Last updated:
19 November 2025
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Summary

The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology gathered a range of ecological data between 2000 and 2004. The data include vegetation, farm management and habitat information, collected from 89 pairs of organic and non-organic fields on 161 farms containing arable crops distributed throughout England. Within these farms, landscape context and farm management practices centred on 30 pairs of target spring cereal fields (in 2000) and 59 pairs of target winter wheat fields (over two seasons 2002-2004). Data were derived at different scales ranging from field to landscape scale using a range of methods. The vegetation data consists of plant records from within target fields which were sampled in 3 years (2000, 2002, 2003) with each field sampled in one of the years. Three plot types were used. (i) Crop margin plots which recorded species presence in plots extending 1 m from the ploughed edge and 100 m along the field edge. (ii) Field boundary plots which recorded presence and abundance (% cover) of species in plots extending 1 m from the centre of the uncultivated field boundary and 10 m parallel to the boundary. Berries were counted in winter from a sub-set of sites. (iii) Percent cover of within-crop plants was recorded in 0.5×0.5 m quadrats placed at distances of 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 m from the ploughed margin on 12 transects per field. Farm management data were collected via land manager questionnaires. Farmers were asked 40 questions concerning management of the target field and the whole farm. Habitat data were summarised at the farm level from the satellite-derived UKCEH Land Cover Map 2000. Invertebrates and birds were also sampled but do not form part of this data set. The study was based on a total of 88 non-organic and 73 organic farms over three cropping seasons between 2000 and 2004. This dataset was created to investigate the benefits of organic farming for biodiversity as part of a DEFRA funded study. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/aa86a268-559c-4f54-8e52-6292ad7901f4

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Added to data.gov.uk
2025-11-13
Access contraints
If you reuse this data, you should cite: Norton, L.R., Scott, R.J., Stuart, R.C., Firbank, L.G., Dodd, B.A., Wright, K.L., Wood, C.M. (2025). Farm management and vegetation plot data from paired organic and conventional farms in England, 2000-2004. NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/aa86a268-559c-4f54-8e52-6292ad7901f4
Harvest GUID
aa86a268-559c-4f54-8e52-6292ad7901f4
Extent
Latitude: 55.812° to °
Longitude: -6.452° to 1.768°
Spatial reference system
Dataset reference date
2025-10-24 (publication)
2025-10-23 (creation)
Frequency of update
Responsible party
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (pointOfContact, author); (author, owner, publisher, custodian)
ISO 19139 resource type
dataset
Metadata language
eng
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