A harmonised 0.1-degree annual dataset of forest gross primary productivity and environmental drivers for China, 1990–2018

This dataset provides a harmonised, multi-variable record of gross primary productivity (GPP) and its environmental drivers across mainland China from 1990 to 2018 at 0.1° spatial resolution. It supports reproducible analyses of vegetation productivity, climate–biosphere interactions, and forest ecosystem dynamics at national scale.
Annual GPP derived from near-infrared reflectance is integrated with climate variables (temperature, precipitation, shortwave radiation, and soil moisture), nighttime lights as a proxy for anthropogenic pressure, and static topographic attributes (elevation, slope, and aspect). All variables are temporally aggregated to annual values and spatially harmonised to a fixed WGS84 0.1° grid with identical extent and alignment across all years.
A forest mask derived from the 2018 China Land-Use/Land-Cover Dataset is provided to enable forest-focused analyses, together with an annual forest fragmentation index (FFI) computed from high-resolution land-cover data using landscape metrics. Climate-zone identifiers based on an aggregated Köppen classification allow stratified analyses across China’s major bioclimatic regions.
The dataset is distributed as annual GeoTIFF layers with comprehensive metadata and example Python and R workflows. All processing scripts are openly released, ensuring full reproducibility and compliance with FAIR data principles.