Construction of digital databases of crop-growing calendars for Japanese crops

Accurate information on agricultural productivity is crucial to addressing the challenges faced by agriculture, including pest threats and climate change. Crop-growing calendars represent a vital source of information for understanding and managing agroecosystems and for enhancing agricultural productivity. This information is also essential for studying the relationship between crop growth stages and pest activity patterns, which is crucial for developing effective pest management strategies. This study systematically digitized the Japanese government's publicly available paper-based statistical data on crop-growing calendars for grain crops, vegetables, and fruit trees across the country. The paper provides a detailed account of the contents of the paper-based statistical data, the digitization procedure, the method for creating the database, and the database structure. This work represents a significant step toward making crop-growing calendar data more accessible and useful for agricultural research and applications. The detailed Metadata and complete data set are available in MetaCat in JaLTER at https://jalter.diasjp.net/data/ERDP-2025-03.