Analysis data for \"The effect of agricultural land retirement on pesticide use\"

Agricultural land retirement generates risks and opportunities for ecological communities and ecosystem services. Of particular interest is the influence of retired cropland on agricultural pests and pesticides, as these uncultivated lands may directly shift the distribution of pesticide use and may serve as a source of pests and/or natural enemies for remaining active croplands. Few studies have investigated how agricultural pesticide use is impacted by land retirement. Here we couple field-level crop and pesticide data from over 200,000 field-year observations and 15 years of production in Kern County, CA, USA to investigate: 1) how much pesticide use and applied toxicity are avoided annually due to the direct effects of retirement, 2) whether surrounding retirement drives pesticide use on active cropland and what types of pesticides are most influenced, and 3) whether the effect of surrounding retirement on pesticide use is dependent on the age or revegetation cover on retired parcel..., Identifying and characterizing retired lands
Vector files representing crop field boundaries from 1997 to 2021 were downloaded from the Kern County Agricultural Commissioner's Office (http://www.kernag.com/gis/gis-data.asp). These geospatial data include information such as farmer (“permit”), area in production, and crop type (“commodity”, “commodity code”), from which we derived crop family. Using the set of permitted fields between 1997 and 2021, we identified fields that changed from production to lack of production or vice versa (see SI methods). Retirement was defined as either a parcel permitted as “uncultivated agriculture” with no other crop produced on that physical location during the year, or as a parcel that did not receive a permit in the focal year, but was cultivated at some point in the time series.
Pesticide use data
California mandates the collection of pesticide use data on production agriculture, which includes information such as date of application, product number,...,  
 
 
 , # Analysis data for \"The effect of agricultural land retirement on pesticide use\"

These data are used to understand the impact of land retirement on pesticides in Kern County, California. For details on the analysis, please see [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165224](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165224)

## Description of the data and file structure

**Below is a basic dictionary to understand variable naming convention.**

### Data File 1 `RetirementStats_postRR_Dryad.csv`

*45 columns/variables and 211,820 rows/observations*

* `IHS` indicates inverse-hyperbolic sine transformed
* `IHSKgHa[pesticide]Fill100` indicate different pesticide use variables that have been IHS transformed.
* `Fill` indicates the variable includes 2021 data from Kern County Agricultural Commissioner's Office since CDPR data are not available (see text)
* `100` indicates the variable was pre-multiplied by 100 prior to IHS transformation (see text)
* `KgHa[]AI` indicates kg/ha of...