Leaf Area Index Products (1990-2023) of the Qinghai Tibet Plateau derived from Landsat series satellite data

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is rich in natural resources and diverse in ecosystems, serving as a crucial ecological security barrier. Leaf Area Index (LAI) is an important parameter that characterizes vegetation canopy structure. Efficiently and accurately obtaining LAI data for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is of great significance for dynamic monitoring of vegetation growth and research on ecological environmental changes in the region. This dataset focuses on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and employs a method that combines the PROSAIL physical mechanism model and machine learning (random forest method) to retrieve LAI. This approach has produced a long-term series (1990-2023) of annual maximum LAI products with a 30-meters resolution for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The nearly 40 years of historical Landsat satellite images archived on the Google Earth Engine platform provide the data support for the production of this dataset. Quality assessments of the product indicate that the annual LAI product of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau performs well in both direct and cross validation. The product results are accurate and effective, providing robust data product support for research on vegetation resource investigations, ecological environment protection, and restoration for the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.