China Ecosystem Resilience Index Dataset (2000-2019)

This repository provides a 1 km annual ecosystem resilience dataset for mainland China covering 2000–2019. The dataset was developed to support ecological monitoring, vulnerability assessment, sustainability analysis, and studies of ecosystem responses to climate variability and land-use change. The product is distributed as annual GeoTIFF files and represents a spatially explicit, relative ecosystem resilience index derived from multi-source environmental indicators.

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The resilience index integrates six indicators describing vegetation condition, climate context, land surface structure, and anthropogenic pressure: normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), nighttime light intensity, gridded carbon emissions, land use/land cover, annual mean temperature, and annual precipitation. All input datasets were harmonized to a common 1 km grid, transformed to consistent directionality, normalized using min–max scaling, and combined using entropy-derived annual weights. The resulting index is unitless and ranges from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating relatively higher ecosystem resilience under the adopted indicator framework.

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Dataset contents

This archive typically includes:

20 annual GeoTIFF files: resilience_index_YYYY.tif for years 2000–2019

Optional annual entropy weights table (CSV), with one row per year and one column per indicator weight

Metadata files describing raster properties, processing parameters, and variable definitions

Code and figure-generation scripts used to reproduce derived figures and summary statistics

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Spatial and temporal coverage

Region: Mainland China

Spatial resolution: 1 km

Temporal coverage: 2000–2019

Format: GeoTIFF

Value range: 0–1

Grid structure: all annual layers are aligned to the same grid for pixel-wise comparison across years

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Method summary

For each year, the workflow proceeds as follows:

align all indicator rasters to the NDVI reference grid;

transform land use into an ecological scoring layer;

normalize each indicator;

calculate annual entropy weights from the normalized layers;

compute the weighted sum to obtain the ecosystem resilience index;

export the annual GeoTIFF and record annual weights.

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Intended use

This dataset is suitable for:

national and regional ecological monitoring;

comparative analyses of spatial resilience patterns;

interannual trend analysis of relative ecosystem resilience;

screening-level environmental assessment and planning;

climate change and human–environment interaction studies.

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Important notes

The released product is a composite, relative indicator of ecosystem resilience rather than a direct measurement of disturbance-specific recovery. Users should interpret the dataset comparatively across space and time and consider the underlying indicator choices, transformations, and weighting method when applying it to high-stakes decisions.