The dataset contains maps of grassland mowing activity in Germany, which have been produced annually at the Thünen Institute since 2017 on the basis of satellite data. The maps cover the entire grassland area, i.e. permanent grassland, potentially permanent grassland (e.g. fodder crops) and other extensive areas. The map was derived from dense time series of Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Landsat 8 and additional environmental data. Map production is based on the methods described in Schwieder et al. (2022).

The dataset includes two layers: (1) the number of detected mowing events, (2) the day of year (DOY) of the first detected mowing event. DOYs of all other detected mowing events together with ancillary data layers are available on request.

The map extent covers all areas in Germany that are defined as permanent grassland, cultivated grassland or fallow land according to the maps of agricultural land use that are available here. Post-processing of the maps included a sieve filter as well as a ruleset for the reduction of non-plausible areas using the Basis-DLM. The final post-processing step comprises the aggregation of the gridded data to homogeneous objects (fields) based on the approach that is described in Tetteh et al. (2021).

Data are available on request either in gridded (raster) format or in aggregated (vector) format. For metadata details please see the specifications below.

• Fernerkundung
• Grünland
• Landnutzung

Creation of raster maps:

Schwieder M, Wesemeyer M, Frantz D, Pfoch K, Erasmi S, Pickert J, Nendel C, Hostert P (2022) Mapping grassland mowing events across Germany based on combined Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 time series. REMOTE SENSING OF ENVIRONMENT 269:112795. doi: 10.1016/j.rse.2021.112795

Creation of field segments:

Tetteh GO, Gocht A, Erasmi S, Schwieder M, Conrad C (2021) Evaluation of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 Feature Sets for Delineating Agricultural Fields in Heterogeneous Landscapes. IEEE Access 9:116702-116719. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3105903