30 m annual land cover and its dynamics in China from 1990 to 2019

Abstract. Land cover (LC) determines the energy exchange, water and carbon cycle between Earth's spheres. Accurate LC information is a fundamental parameter for the environment and climate studies. Considering that the LC in China has been altered dramatically with the economic development in the past few decades, sequential and fine-scale LC monitoring is in urgent need. However, currently, fine-resolution annual LC dataset produced by the observational images is generally unavailable for China due to the lack of sufficient training samples and computational capabilities. To deal with this issue, we produced the first Landsat-derived annual China Land Cover Dataset (CLCD) on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, which contains 30 m annual LC and its dynamics of China from 1990 to 2019. We first collected the training samples by combining stable samples extracted from China’s Land-Use/Cover Datasets (CLUD), and visually-interpreted samples from satellite time-series data, Google Earth and Google Map. Using 335,709 Landsat images on the GEE, several temporal metrics were constructed and fed to the random forest classifier to obtain classification results. We then proposed a post-processing method incorporating spatial-temporal filtering and logical reasoning to further improve the spatial-temporal consistency of CLCD. Finally, the overall accuracy of CLCD reached 79.31 % based on 5,463 visually-interpreted samples. A further assessment based on 5,131 third-party test samples showed that the overall accuracy of CLCD outperforms that of MCD12Q1, ESACCI_LC, FROM_GLC, and GlobaLand30. Besides, we intercompared the CLCD with several Landsat-derived thematic products, which exhibited good consistencies with the Global Forest Change, the Global Surface Water, and three impervious surface products. Based on the CLCD, the trends and patterns of China’s LC changes during 1985 and 2019 were revealed, such as expansion of impervious surface (+148.71 %) and water (+18.39 %), decrease of cropland (−4.85 %) and grassland (−3.29 %), increase of forest (+4.34 %). In general, CLCD reflected the rapid urbanization and a series of ecological projects (e.g., Gain for Green) in China and revealed the anthropogenic implications on LC under the condition of climate change, signifying its potential application in the global change research. The CLCD dataset introduced in this article is freely available at http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4417810 (Yang and Huang, 2021).