AfricanCropCalendar: A geo-referenced dataset of crop growing seasons across diverse agro-ecological regions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Large-scale agricultural household surveys provide essential data on farming households' socioeconomics, land management, and agricultural indicators, and allow detailed micro-scale comparisons while ensuring national representativeness. The AfricanCropCalendar dataset provides cleaned, harmonised, and validated survey data describing the growing season of several hundred crops from six African countries between 2009-2019.It complements existing datasets by including geographical identifiers to link with climate, soil, or Earth observation data. Collected through the LSMS-ISA program, the surveys cover crop planting and harvesting dates, anonymized field locations, and crop species grown. The data were harmonised by assigning consistent variable names, correcting inconsistencies, standardising crop names, and creating unique plot identifiers. This comprehensive dataset offers novel insights into African cropping systems and growing seasons and provides a basis for assessing drivers of shifts in growing seasons.This dataset is described in a data publication:Katharina Waha, Sophie Rötzer, Koen De Vos, Uwe Grewer, Altaaf Mechiche-Alami, Andrew Tomes (2025): African Crop Calendar: A geo-referenced dataset of crop growing seasons across diverse agro-ecological regions. <i>Scientific Data</i>.

大规模农业农户调查可提供关于农户社会经济状况、土地管理与农业指标的核心数据，既能开展精细化的微观尺度对比分析，又能保障样本的全国代表性。非洲作物生长季数据集（AfricanCropCalendar）提供了经过清洗、协调统一与验证的调研数据，涵盖2009至2019年间6个非洲国家数百种作物的生长季相关信息。该数据集通过纳入可与气候、土壤或地球观测（Earth observation）数据关联的地理标识符，对现有数据集进行了补充完善。本次调研依托LSMS-ISA项目开展，涵盖作物播种与收获日期、匿名化地块位置以及种植的作物物种信息。数据处理环节通过统一变量命名、修正数据不一致问题、标准化作物名称以及生成唯一地块标识符，完成了全流程的协调统一工作。这套全面的数据集为非洲种植制度与作物生长季的研究提供了全新视角，同时可为作物生长季变化的驱动因素评估提供坚实的研究基础。该数据集的相关研究成果发表于数据科学领域的学术出版物：Katharina Waha、Sophie Rötzer、Koen De Vos、Uwe Grewer、Altaaf Mechiche-Alami、Andrew Tomes（2025）：《非洲作物生长季数据集：覆盖多样农业生态区的作物生长季地理参考数据集》，刊载于《科学数据》（Scientific Data）期刊。