BGS Hosted Metadata
Farm management and vegetation plot data from paired organic and conventional farms in England, 2000-2004
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.
Simple
- Date (Publication)
- 2025-10-24
- Date (Creation)
- 2025-10-23
- Citation identifier
- https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/aa86a268-559c-4f54-8e52-6292ad7901f4
- Point of contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Wood, C.M.
Point of contact UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
Norton, L.R. Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Scott, R.J. Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Stuart, R.C.
Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Firbank, L.G.
Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Dodd, B.A.
Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Wright, K.L.
Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Wood, C.M. Author UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Owner NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Publisher NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Custodian
- Access constraints
- Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- no limitations
- Use constraints
- Other restrictions
- Spatial representation type
- TIN
- Distance
- 1 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
- Language
- English
- Character set
- UTF8
- Topic category
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- Environment
- Begin date
- 2000-01-01
- End date
- 2004-12-31
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- Unique resource identifier
- OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
- Distribution format
-
Name Version Comma-separated values (CSV)
- Distributor contact
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Distributor
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Other
-
dataset
Conformance result
- Title
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Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services
- Date (Publication)
- 2010-12-08
- Statement
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Data were collected from organic and non-organic farms. The selection procedure for study sites initially focused on the organic farms. Criteria for selecting organic farms were: (1) they should be at least 30 hectares, (2) highly fragmented holdings (i.e. where organic fields were interspersed with non-organic fields) were avoided, (3) agro-forestry and predominantly horticultural and grass enterprises were excluded, (4) they had to be growing the right crops in the right years. All data were collected on paper in the field by professional ecologists. They were then digitised later in the office and stored in a relational database.
Metadata
- File identifier
- aa86a268-559c-4f54-8e52-6292ad7901f4 XML
- Metadata language
- English
- Character set
- 8859 Part 1
- Hierarchy level
- Dataset
- Hierarchy level name
-
dataset
- Date stamp
- 2025-10-24T08:15:02
- Metadata standard name
- UK GEMINI
- Metadata standard version
-
2.3
- Metadata author
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Organisation name Individual name Electronic mail address Role NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre Point of contact
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