Annual maps of rural settlements in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, China (1990 to 2020)

Using the Landsat-derived impervious surface area (ISA) data, the prolonged artificial Nighttime-light (NTL) data, and the Point of Interest (POI) data on the Google Earth Engine, we built the first annual maps of rural settlements (RUS) in the rapid urbanization region of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) in North China during 1990-2020. The RUS mapping model proposed in this study on the basis of referring to similar studies consisted of three basic steps, including kernel density estimation, initial boundary delineation, and post-processing. The location-based and the area-based comparison verified the effectiveness of our results, with a mean overall accuracy of 85% and a mean correlation value of 0.88, respectively.