The HESTIA Data Standard

The HESTIA Data Standard defines how agricultural production practices and environmental outcomes are represented in structured data. It enables data from different sources, countries, and production systems to be stored in a common format and meaningfully compared.

The Data Standard consists of three components: a Schema defining the structure of the data, a Glossary providing standardised terminology, and Data Validation ensuring data quality and consistency.

Schema

The HESTIA Schema defines the nodes, fields, and relationships used to represent agricultural data. Data in HESTIA are organised into the following core nodes:

• Source: a publication, database, or other reference from which data are drawn. Each Source contains bibliographic information such as title, authors, DOI, and publication year.
• Organisation: an entity that manages one or more Sites (e.g., a farm, a company, or a research institution). Organisations are optional.
• Site: the area on which production occurs. Typically a field for growing crops or grazing animals, an aquaculture pond, a building, or semi-natural vegetation. Sites can also represent whole farms, regions, or countries. Sites contain geographical information (country, region, coordinates), soil and climate measurements, and management data.
• Cycle: describes the production of a crop, animal, animal product, or processed food during a typical production period. A Cycle contains inputs (e.g., fertiliser, energy, water), products (e.g., harvested crop, milk, meat), practices (e.g., tillage, irrigation), and emissions (e.g., N₂O, NH₃, CO₂). Each Cycle is linked to a Site and a Source.
• Impact Assessment: quantifies the life cycle environmental impacts of a product from a Cycle. Impact Assessments contain characterised indicators (e.g., greenhouse gas emissions in kg CO₂ eq) and resource use (e.g., land use in m²·year).

All nodes are linked through identifiers. Each node indexed on the platform has an @id. New nodes being uploaded for the first time use a temporary id, which is replaced by an @id upon indexing.

For the full specification, see the Schema documentation. For frequently asked questions about the Schema, see the Schema FAQ.

Completeness Flags

Cycles include a set of boolean completeness flags (e.g., completeness.fertiliser, completeness.cropResidue, completeness.excreta, completeness.electricityFuel) that indicate whether each input category has been fully recorded. A flag set to TRUE means all inputs of that type have been reported — including recording zero values where no inputs were used. This distinction between "no data" and "zero" is critical for the emission models: a Cycle with completeness.fertiliser = TRUE and no fertiliser inputs will correctly produce zero fertiliser emissions, whereas a Cycle without the completeness flag will be skipped by the fertiliser emission models entirely.

Glossary

The HESTIA Glossary contains hundreds of thousands of standardised terms used across all data on the platform. These terms ensure that the same vocabulary is used consistently, regardless of the data source or contributor.

The Glossary covers:

• Products: crop, animal, and processed food products (e.g., Wheat, grain).
• Inputs: materials and resources used in production (e.g., Urea (kg N), Diesel).
• Emissions: substances emitted during production, split into substance, compartment, and the process creating them (e.g., N2O, to air, inorganic fertiliser, direct).
• Practices: management activities on Sites or Cycles.
• Measurements: site-level observations (e.g., Clay, Rainfall (hourly)).
• Indicators: characterised environmental indicators (e.g., GWP100, Scarcity weighted water use).
• Regions: geographical regions from the GADM database, covering countries and subnational administrative areas.

Each term defines the units in which data must be provided (e.g., kilograms of nitrogen per hectare). For terms with percentages as units, values should be on a 0 to 100 scale.

Data uploaded to HESTIA must use terms from the Glossary. Terms can be referenced in upload files using their @id or name. New terms can be proposed through the platform.

For further information, see the Glossary FAQ.

Data Validation

HESTIA applies a series of validation checks to all uploaded data to ensure consistency and quality. Validation operates at three levels:

1. Term validation: checks that all terms referenced in the data exist in the Glossary and are used in the correct context (e.g., an emission term is not used as an input).
2. Schema validation: checks that the data conform to the Schema — required fields are present, data types are correct, and node relationships are valid.
3. Data validation: checks the data themselves against a range of domain-specific rules (e.g., values are within plausible ranges, percentage terms sum to 100, completeness assessments are consistent with the data provided).

Validation can be run locally before uploading using the open-source validation tools:

• Term validation: @hestia-earth/utils
• Schema validation: @hestia-earth/schema-validation
• Data validation: hestia_earth.validation

See Validation Tools for installation and usage instructions.

Converting Data to HESTIA Format

Most users prepare their data by manually converting it into an Excel or JSON file that conforms to the HESTIA Schema. The Preparing a dataset guide and Example uploads describe this process in detail.

For cases where conversion needs to be generalisable and repeatable (e.g., importing from a database or other LCA software on an ongoing basis), the HESTIA Convert Base library provides an open-source framework for building automated converters into HESTIA-compatible JSON-LD.

Data Format

HESTIA uses JSON-LD (JSON for Linked Data) as its native data format. JSON-LD is a structured format that supports linked data principles, enabling data to be connected across nodes and integrated into automated workflows and APIs.

For upload, data can be prepared in CSV or Excel format. The platform converts these to JSON-LD during the upload process. See Preparing a dataset for details on structuring upload files.