Long-term vegetation carbon turnover dataset of typical mature and young forests in China from 2004 to 2020

The vegetation carbon turnover time (τveg), together with net carbon uptake, determines both the current capacity and future potential for vegetation carbon sequestration. There is a general decreasing trend of τveg in mature forests in many parts of the world, but these studies have ignored the extensive areas of the world, especially in recently developing regions dominated by young forests.To evaluate the temporal trends of τveg and its driving mechanisms across young and mature forests, we generated a dataset of τveg in 28 forest plots (11 mature forests and 17 young forests) collected between 2004 and 2020, based on the long-term standardized in-situ monitoring of Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN). Forest plots of CERN with a minimum of at least three censuses over 10 years were included in the dataset.The dataset mainly includes biomass, litterfall, carbon loss (litterfall and mortality), carbon turnover time of vegetation (τveg) of 11 mature forests and 11 young forests, as well as the corresponding influential factors, i.e., annual mean temperature, annual mean precipitation, atmospheric CO2 concentration, nitrogen deposition, tree diameter at breast height (DBH), tree density, and stand density index (SDI).All data processing was performed in R version 4.4.1, and the missing data means that there are no observations for a given year in certain plots. The descriptions of the column headers of the data table are detailed in the readme file.