UK National List/Recommended List cereals variety trials data

Winter wheat, winter barley and spring barley yield data from the UK National List (NL) and Recommended List (RL) field variety trials dataset for the period 1982-2018 (1983-2018 for spring barley). The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) Recommended Lists is managed by a project consortium of AHDB, the British Society of Plant Breeders (BSPB), Maltsters’ Association of Great Britain (MAGB) and the United Kingdom Flour Millers (UKFM). Full data for 2002 onwards is available at ahdb.org.uk/rl. Trials were located across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and were focused in relevant growing areas. Since 1982, cereal trials have been split into fungicide untreated and treated trials.Prior to statistical analysis, we applied several pre-processing steps and quality control of the trials data. This step was required to amalgamate data from different databases. Variety-year combinations with only one or two sites were removed to avoid unrepresentative results due to insufficient replication. This included all varieties introduced in 2011, which were only present for one or two years and/or had just one or two sites per year.