Species phenology and ground phenology maps over China from 1951-2020

This dataset provides grided species phenology (SP) maps of 24 woody plants and ground phenology (GP) maps of forests over China (18°N-54°N，72′°E-136°E) from 1951 to 2020, with a spatial resolution of 0.1° and a temporal resolution of 1 day. Three phenophases, namely the first leaf date (FLD), first flower date (FFD), and 100% leaf coloring date (LCD), were included for each species. Data Quality: The SP maps of 24 species are largely consistent with the in-situ observations in China, with an average error of 6.4, 7.5 and 10.8 days for FLD, FFD and LCD, respectively. The GP maps of forests have good consistency with the existing LSP products in China, particularly in DF areas, where the correlation coefficients between GP and LSP in FLD and LCD were 0.91 and 0.84, respectively, and the differences were 8.8 days and 15.1 days, respectively. Method: Based on the in-situ phenology observations from the Chinese Phenology Observation Network (CPON) in the past 70 years, this dataset employed three spring phenology models (Unichill, Unified and Temporal-Spatial Coupling) and two autumn phenology models (Multiple Regression, Temperature-Photoperiod) to simulate and upscale the phenology data on the national scale, and generate the SP maps of woody plants in China. Four aggregation methods (weighted average (mean), weighted percentile (pct50, pct20\80, pct10\90)) were used to generate the GP maps of forests in China based on the SP maps. The weight of each species was determined by the species distribution probability. Dataset composition: The dataset contains the yearly SP maps of 24 woody plants (China_SP.zip) and GP maps of forests(China_GP.zip) over China from 1951 to 2020, including spring FLD, FFD and autumn LCD. Each map is stored in a GeoTIFF formatted 16-bit signed integer file containing a raster with two dimensions (641 row × 361 column). Data files are named according to "China + phenophase (XXD) + species/method + year (YYYY)". For example, "China_FLD_Acer_pictum_2020.tif" is the SP map of Acer pictum’s FLD in 2020, and “China_FLD_mean_2020.tif” is the GP map of weighted averaged FLD in 2020. The unit of phenology data is Julian day of year (DOY), which represents the actual number of days from the date of phenology occurrence to January 1 of the current year. The valid value is 1-366, and the invalid filling value is -1. The spatial reference system of the data is EPSG:4326 (WGS84).