This manuscript comes with a large 20-year dataset characterizing various physicochemical soil and crop productivity parameters over a twenty-year period at UC Davis’ long-term agricultural experiment station, otherwise known as “Russell Ranch”.

Abstract. The Century Experiment at the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility at the University of California, Davis provides long-term agroecological data from row crop systems in California’s Central Valley starting in 1993. The Century Experiment was initially designed to study the effects of a gradient of water and nitrogen availability on soil properties and crop performance in ten different cropping systems to measure tradeoffs and synergies between agricultural productivity and sustainability. Currently systems include 11 different cropping systems–consisting of four different crops and a cover crop mixture–and one native grass system. This paper describes the long-term core data from the Century Experiment from 1993–2014, including crop yields and biomass, crop elemental contents, aerial-photo-based Normalized Difference Vegetation Index data, soil properties, weather, chemical constituents in irrigation water, winter weed populations, and operational data including fertilizer and pesticide application amounts and dates, planting dates, planting quantity and crop variety, and harvest dates. This data set represents the only known long-term set of data characterizing food production and sustainability in irrigated and rainfed Mediterranean annual cropping systems. There are no copyright restrictions associated with the use of this dataset.

Please cite as: Wolf, K. M., Torbert, E. E., Bryant, D., Burger, M., Denison, R. F., Herrera, I., Hopmans, J., Horwath, W., Kaffka, S., Kong, A. Y. Y., Norris, R. F., Six, J., Tomich, T. P. and Scow, K. M. (2018), The century experiment: the first twenty years of UC Davis’ Mediterranean agroecological experiment. Ecology. doi:10.1002/ecy.2105

Download the paper describing the dataset here: Wolf et al. 2018, Century Experiment, or find it and all supplemental materials here: Wolf et al. 2018

Supplemental data files can be downloaded directly here as well: Data Files Zip

This is a great dataset for a meta-analytical approach to investigating a variety of ecosystem processes and agricultural productivity and management over a twenty-year period in the Central Valley of California. Additional data for years after 2014 can be obtained by contacting Russell Ranch directly.