Yield and physiology data of four African crops exposed to varying ozone concentrations, grown in solardomes, UK, 2018

Data are presented from an ozone exposure experiment performed on four African crops. The crops (Beans, Cowpeas, Amaranth and Sorghum) were exposed to three different levels of ozone and two heat treatments in the UK CEH Bangor solardomes. The experiment ran from May 2018 to September 2018. The crop plants were grown from seed, in pots in solardomes. The aim of the experiment was to investigate the impact of ozone exposure on the crop yield and plant health.

The dataset comprises of manually collected data on plant physiology, biomass and yield. In addition the automatically logged data of ozone concentration and meteorological variables in the solardomes are presented.

Plant physiology data is stomatal conductance of individual leaves, measured on an ad-hoc basis. The dataset includes the associated data measured by the equipment (relative humidity, leaf temperature, photosynthetically active radiation – a small number of photosynthetically active radiation measurements are missing due to faulty readings). Soil moisture of the pots was always measured at the same time, and chlorophyll content of the measured leaf was usually, but not always, determined at the same time.

Yield of beans and cowpeas was determined for each plant. For Amaranth, only the seed head weight was determined. Sorghum did not reach yield, therefore, total biomass at harvest is given as an alternative. Total biomass was not determined for those plants of other crop types that did reach yield.

The ozone and meteorological dataset is complete, but with some gap-filling for short periods when the computer was not logging data

The work was carried out as part of the NERC funded SUNRISE project (NE/R000131/1).