All public data on the HESTIA platform are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. This means the data may be freely shared, adapted, and used for any purpose, provided appropriate credit is given.
Each data page on the platform displays the citations to use. These always include a citation for HESTIA and a citation for the original data source(s).
The HESTIA citation is:
HESTIA Team (2023) HESTIA: A harmonized way to represent, share, and analyse agri-environmental data.
This citation is displayed on every data page and is updated periodically.
For individual Cycles, cite the original Source (the publication or database from which the data were drawn). The full bibliographic details are displayed on the data page.
When HESTIA models have been applied to recalculate or gap-fill the original data (i.e., the data are in recalculated mode), cite both the HESTIA citation and the original Source, as both have contributed to the final dataset.
For aggregated data, cite the HESTIA citation and all underlying Sources that contributed to the aggregation. These are listed on the aggregation's data page.
For most uses, citing the HESTIA citation above is sufficient — the models are part of the platform and do not require separate citation.
Where a specific model is the focus of a research application, or where the methodological detail of a particular model is important to the analysis, cite the underlying methodology source alongside HESTIA. Each model's documentation page lists the relevant methodology reference, including specific chapter, table, and equation numbers where applicable. For example, if the IPCC (2019) Tier 1 N2O methodology is central to the research, cite:
IPCC (2019). 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. Volume 4: Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use.
The model source code is available at https://gitlab.com/hestia-earth/hestia-engine-models.