Collation of published data on cotton lint yield response to nitrogen fertiliser

Cotton yield responses to N collated from publications and other data sources. These data were used in the publication: "Uncertainty in nitrogen fertiliser management of cotton crops: Implications for sustainable production from a meta-analysis."Most data come from publications on Australian experiments. However, there are data from three studies in USA (Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia) and one in China. The location information only relates to the Australia data. Lineage: Data were collated data from both the academic and "grey" literature on the response of lint yields to N applications for irrigated cotton crops in Australia. Two approaches were taken to find relevant publications. Firstly, a literature search was performed in the Google search engine and Google Scholar with different combinations of keywords such as "cotton", "nitrogen", "rate", "data", "yield" and "Australia". We then consulted agronomists and researchers working in the Australia cotton industry to find additional publications, such as those in industry websites or other repositories. While the main focus of the searches was crops in Australia, we repeated Google searches excluding the term "Australia" to find publications from other countries. Data on lint yields at different rates of applied N fertiliser were extracted from the publications. The experiments reported were ran for multiple years and the N rates may have been imposed within other treatments (e.g. crop rotation). We refer to data from a site in a single year and within a single treatment as a dataset. Any metadata available for each dataset were collated. The most common metadata were variety planted, year and month of planting, preceding crops and fallows, location, soil texture and type, mineral N at planting, fertiliser type and method of irrigation application. Economic optimum N fertiliser rate (Nopt) and the yield at Nopt values, if presented, were also collated.