Annual Gridded Dataset of New Cropland, New Sloping Cropland, and Forest-Derived New Sloping Cropland in China, 1992–2023

This dataset provides annual gridded information on new cropland, new sloping cropland, and forest-derived new sloping cropland in China from 1992 to 2023. It was developed to characterize the spatial and temporal patterns of cropland expansion into sloping areas and the conversion of forest land to new sloping cropland. New cropland was identified as land classified as non-cropland during the preceding two consecutive years and as cropland during the subsequent three consecutive years. Sloping cropland was defined as cropland located on land with a slope greater than 6°. Forest-derived new sloping cropland refers to new sloping cropland converted from land previously classified as forest. The dataset is provided as the comma-separated values file “steep_area_v1_merged.csv”. Each record represents the area of a specific cropland expansion category within a spatial grid cell in a given year. The “id_unique” field provides the unique identifier of each grid cell, while the “lon” and “lat” fields provide its longitude and latitude coordinates, respectively. Area values are expressed in square kilometres. The dataset can support studies of cropland expansion, land-use change, sloping farmland development, forest conversion, food-production potential, and the ecological consequences of agricultural land expansion in China. The three cropland categories are nested rather than mutually exclusive: “new_steep” is a subset of “new”, and “new_steep_forest” is a subset of “new_steep”. Therefore, the areas of the three categories should not be summed directly.