Assessing nitrate groundwater hotspots in Europe reveals an inadequate designation of Nitrate Vulnerable Zones.

Monitoring networks show that the European Union Nitrates Directive (ND) has had mixed success in reducing nitrate concentrations in groundwater. By combining machine learning and monitored nitrate concentrations (1992-2019), we estimate the total area of nitrate hotspots in Europe to be 401,000 km, with 47% occurring outside of Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NVZs). We also found contrasting increasing or decreasing trends, varying per country and time periods.

SoilTemp: A global database of near-surface temperature.

Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked.

Weakened growth of cropland-N O emissions in China associated with nationwide policy interventions.

China has experienced rapid agricultural development over recent decades, accompanied by increased fertilizer consumption in croplands; yet, the trend and drivers of the associated nitrous oxide (N O) emissions remain uncertain. The primary sources of this uncertainty are the coarse spatial variation of activity data and the incomplete model representation of N O emissions in response to agricultural management. Here, we provide new data-driven estimates of cropland-N O emissions across China in 1990-2014, compiled using a global cropland-N O flux observation dataset, nationwide survey-based reconstruction of N-fertilization and irrigation, and an updated nonlinear model.