Yield and physiology data of four African crops exposed to varying ozone concentrations, grown in solardomes, UK, 2017

Data are presented from an ozone exposure experiment performed on five African crops. The crops (Beans, cowpea, finger millet, pearl millet and wheat) were exposed to three different levels of ozone in the UK CEH Bangor solardomes. Wheat was grown at UK ambient temperature, whereas the solardomes were heated for the other crops to better mimic tropical conditions. The experiment ran from May 2017 to September 2017. 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). 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 was determined for each plant, in addition to yield-related metrics including mass per bean and 100 grain weight. For finger millet and pearl millet yield is expressed as weight of seed heads and number of seed heads, rather than explicitly as seed weight. 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).