Cereal grain mineral micronutrient and soil chemistry data from GeoNutrition surveys in Ethiopia and Malawi.

The dataset comprises primary data for the concentration of 29 mineral micronutrients in cereal grains and up to 84 soil chemistry properties from GeoNutrition project surveys in Ethiopia and Malawi. The work provided insights on geospatial variation in the micronutrient concentration in staple crops, and the potential influencing soil factors. In Ethiopia, sampling was conducted in Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions, during the late-2017 and late-2018 harvest seasons. In Malawi, national-scale sampling was conducted during the April-June 2018 harvest season. The concentrations of micronutrients in grain were measured using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). Soil chemistry properties reported include soil pH; total soil nitrogen; total soil carbon (C); soil organic C; effective cation exchange capacity and exchangeable cations; a three-step sequential extraction scheme for the fractionation of sulfur and selenium; available phosphate; diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (DTPA)-extractable trace elements; extractable trace elements using 0.01 M Ca(NO3)2 and 0.01 M CaCl2; and isotopically exchangeable Zn. These data are reported here according to FAIR data principles to enable users to further explore agriculture-nutrition linkages

Cereal grain mineral micronutrient and soil chemistry data from GeoNutrition surveys in Ethiopia and Malawi

Through the GeoNutrition project, 1352 georeferenced staple cereal grain and soil sample pairs from Ethiopia’s Amhara, Oromia, and Tigray regions and 1812 sample pairs from Malawi were collected from farms under a rainfed and smallholder farming systems. Field metadata was collected using KoBoCollect, an open-source georeferenced mobile data collection application. The elemental concentration in the staple cereals and soil properties were determined using standard wet chemistry digestion, extraction, and analysis procedures. A total of 29 cereal grain elemental concentrations from Ethiopia and Malawi, and 84 and 69 soil elemental concentrations or fractions from Ethiopia and Malawi, respectively were analysed and reported in these datasets. The major staple cereal crops sampled from Ethiopia included barley (n=175), finger millet (n=37), maize (n=290), sorghum (n=135), Teff (n=362), and wheat (n=325). Staple cereals collected from Malawi included maize (n=1608), pearl millet (n=32), rice (n=54) and sorghum (n=117). The datasets are presented in a workbook or zipped comma separated value (CSV) file for Ethiopia and Malawi. These datasets may be of interest to researchers, public institutions and non-governmental organisations working in the fields of agriculture, public health and nutrition, environmental protection, and fertiliser development