Gross nutrient balance

An agri-environmental account of the difference between nitrogen and phosphorus entering agricultural soils as inputs (mineral fertiliser, manure, fixation, deposition) and leaving via outputs.

Eurostat publishes it per country, nutrient and balance component from 1985 to 2023 as JSON-stat, TSV, SDMX and CSV.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - Eurostat Gross nutrient balance (aei_pr_gnb) — "1 freq x 2 nutrients x 40 indicators x 32 geographies x 39 years". - coverage.granularity — "Country x nutrient x balance component x year". - short_description — "full input and output breakdowns including mineral and organic fertiliser consumption, manure, fixation and deposition".

Conventions decide whether two sources can be joined at all. Buy one side of an analysis that ignores this convention and every reconciliation step — calendar alignment, unit conversion, entity matching — lands on your team instead of the vendor's.

The failure mode is concrete: a source can carry the Gross nutrient balance label while differing from what you need on exactly the dimension that matters — 1 freq x 2 nutrients x 40 indicators x 32 geographies x 39 years. Comparing two sources on that line usually settles the choice faster than any feature matrix.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and Eurostat Gross nutrient balance (aei_pr_gnb) lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open Eurostat Gross nutrient balance (aei_pr_gnb) and confirm its record — "1 freq x 2 nutrients x 40 indicators x 32 geographies x 39 years" — against the files you actually receive. 2. Open coverage.granularity and confirm its record — "Country x nutrient x balance component x year" — against the files you actually receive. 3. Open short_description and confirm its record — "full input and output breakdowns including mineral and organic fertiliser consumption, manure, fixation and deposition" — against the files you actually receive. 4. Pin down update cadence in writing.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - JSON-stat - Nutrient application rate - Plant nutrient