Our aim was to assess the role of ditches in the greenhouse gas budget of peat landscapes. Therefore, we quantified year-round (May 2017 till May 2018) emissions of ebullitive and diffusive methane and carbon dioxide emissions from 10 drainage ditches and on several occasions we measured nitrous oxide emissions. We found that all ditches acted as greenhouse gas source on an annual basis, where ebullition made up nearly half of the total greenhouse gas emissions from the ditches and we therefore suggest that ebullition should not be omitted in greenhouse gas studies on drainage ditches. We indicated that 12% of Dutch annual methane emissions can be attributed to ditches, which points out that ditch emissions are important on a national scale and in ditch-rich landscapes globally.

In this repository we provide a detailed R-script (‘Data_analysis_ditch_emissions.R’) with these statistical analyses. We also archive our measured data and data used for our calculations:

• ‘Measured_values_dataset_csv.csv’ contains all measurements for the 10 ditches performed on each sampling time.

• ‘Seasonal_variation_emissions_csv.csv’ was used for data-analysis in our R-script and contains ebullitive CH4, diffusive CH4, diffusive CO2 and total greenhouse gas emissions for all 10 ditches.

• ‘Interpolated_emission_data_workbook_csv.csv’ and ‘Interpolated_water_quality_data_workbook_csv.csv’ where greenhouse gas emissions and water quality variables were calculated for each day of the year by interpolating the measured values from ‘Measured_values_dataset_csv.csv’.

• ‘Yearly_average_values_dataset_csv.csv’ contains the average values of the emissions and water quality variables based on interpolation over a year (the two above mentioned workbooks).

• ‘Average_values_pls_csv.csv’ and ‘PLS_dataframe_csv.csv’ were used for data-analysis of our PLS plot in the R-script and contains average values over the year.

• 'Documentation_metadata_csv.csv' provides all metadata from the above mentioned documents.

The following variables were included in these data records: diffusive methane (CH4) emission; ebullitive CH4 emission; diffusive carbon dioxide (CO2) emission; total greenhouse gas (GHG) emission; oxygen concentration (O2) at the surface water, 20cm below surface and near the sediment; pH at the surface water and 20cm below surface; ditch width; water depth; drainage depth; alkalinity; dissolved inorganic carbon; dissolved CH4 and CO2; production of CH4 and CO2; aluminium, calcium, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, sulphur, silicon, zinc, phosphate, nitrate and ammonium concentrations in the surface water and porewater; loss on ignition; monthly averaged precipitation.