The ASSIST (Achieving Sustainable Agricultural Systems) project is a 5 year collaborative research project bringing together expertise from Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, British Geological Survey and Rothamsted Research. The main aim is to develop and test innovative solutions to the challenge of increasing food production whilst reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture.
A key task under ASSIST is to bring together existing large scale datasets from the academic community, government bodies, the farming industry and citizen scientists. These can then be combined in novel ways to inform us about the factors which influence agricultural production, its sustainability and its impact on the environment. We can then use this information to identify constraints and challenges and help to target research into potential solutions.
We present an example of using a time series of national scale data to examine the effect of biodiversity and landscape configuration on the resilience of crop yield (i.e. its consistency over time). We explore some of the challenges involved in integrating large scale spatial datasets from multiple sources, and some of the potential advantages of doing so.