Collection of field-based indicators for biophysical assessment of ecosystem services in crop fields

The file contains a list of indicators that can be used for quantifying provisioning and regulation ecosystem services (ES) in crop fields via empirical measure methods. It aims to support researchers and practitioners in selecting context-specific indicators that enhance site-specific knowledge about ES in crop fields, for the development of sustainable cropping systems. The indicators presented in this dataset were extracted from the articles corpus of a systematic review : Boerema, A., Rebelo, A. J., Bodi, M. B., Esler, K. J., & Meire, P. (2016). Are ecosystem services adequately quantified? Journal of Applied Ecology, 54(2). Boerema et al. (2016) review compiles 507 indicators used in the scientific literature for measuring ES across various ecosystems from 2006 to 2014. We examined the corpus of articles from their review and filtered all the linked indicators to retain a collection of 119 indicators that are: Usable for assessing provisioning and regulation ES in agroecosystems, specifically in crop fields; Using empirical data collection methods such as field observations and remote sensing to obtain biophysical data about ES. The list of indicators is presented in a dataset with two tables : Table 1 : it details for each indicator the ES section, ES category in the framework “input and output ES”, ES name in Boerema classification, ES group, class and code in the CICES V5.1, indicator level in the cascade model, simplified indicator name, DOI of reference paper(s), and main authors of reference paper(s). For each combination of ES indicator and reference paper, we also included the method of data collection, the unit of the indicator, and a brief description of the protocol. Table 2 : it links the original names used in Boerema et al. (2016) review, and the simplified names we use for our list Changes between version 1.0.0 (old) ad 2.0.0 (current) of the dataset : the old dataset was conceived as a relational database, with multiple tables for each entity and each link between entities. The current dataset is a jointed version of that relational database, with all entities combined in only two tables.