A systematic review of open data in agriculture

In this work, we perform a systematic literature review of Open Data and Public Domain datasets in Agriculture. We use the PRISMA method to analyze the existing academic literature about open data in agriculture, concretely 1401 papers from the IEEE Xplore and Web of Science collections, published from 2012 to 2022. Many of these articles use or make available datasets of very different typologies, like sensor data, statistical data or satellite images, among others kinds. Some papers talk about different relevant topics that influence the use of open data, like the lack of open data for research purposes, barriers to adopting or sharing data, privacy concerns, data-sharing recommendations and guidelines. In addition, with the help of a script created ad-hoc for this research work, we analyze the degree of compliance within the FAIR principles of all the public domain or open datasets that we have been able to identify from the literature, concretely 104 datasets. The script can check the compliance of Gen2 maturity indicators of a list of resources. Using these metrics, we have been able to identify those open datasets that might be at risk of stopping to be available and started a “rescue operation”. For those datasets whose terms permitted it, we migrated those Open Data datasets to Zenodo, a repository that complies with the availability principles. This will ensure the future survival of valuable data in Agriculture.