Use cases and scientific potential of land use data from the EU's Integrated Administration and Control System: A systematic mapping review

As of the 2021 reform of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), Member States are obliged to make land use datasets from the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) publicly available. These data include annual geospatially referenced information on crops grown on all land used by farmers to claim CAP-related payments. This paper sets out to comprehensively collect and systematically review scientific literature that has used IACS land use data. It provides a reference for future users of the data and demonstrates their unique scientific potential. Following the methodology of a systematic mapping review, we identified 270 publications using IACS land use data from Austria, Czechia (formerly the Czech Republic), France, Germany, and Sweden. Most were from the disciplines of ecology, agronomy, and land use sciences with fewer from remote sensing, economics, hydrology, and medicine. Based on a subsample analysis, we demonstrate that IACS land use data are most commonly used to describe agricultural land use and related impacts on ecological and agronomic outcomes, and to calibrate various types of models to observed land use. However, it appears that research groups using the data are not well connected, common terminology is lacking, and reproducibility suffers from missing details about data acquisition, pre-processing, and use. For more effective data use, we suggest increased collaboration, improved data infrastructure and documentation, and data harmonization.