Within the ESA funded WorldCereal project we have built an open harmonized reference data repository at global extent for model training or product validation in support of land cover and crop type mapping. Data from 2017 onwards were collected from many different sources and then harmonized, annotated and evaluated. These steps are explained in the harmonization protocol (10.5281/zenodo.7584463). This protocol also clarifies the naming convention of the shape files and the WorldCereal attributes (LC, CT, IRR, valtime and sampleID) that were added to the original data sets. This publication includes those harmonized data sets of which the original data set was published under the CC-BY license or a license similar to CC-BY. See document "_In-situ-data-World-Cereal - license - CC-BY.pdf" for an overview of the original data sets.