A harmonised 0.1-degree annual dataset of forest gross primary productivity and environmental drivers for China, 1990–2018

This dataset provides a harmonised, multi-variable record of gross primary productivity (GPP) and its environmental drivers across mainland China from 1990 to 2018 at 0.1° spatial resolution. It supports reproducible analyses of vegetation productivity, climate–biosphere interactions, and forest ecosystem dynamics at national scale.Annual GPP derived from near-infrared reflectance is integrated with climate variables (temperature, precipitation, shortwave radiation, and soil moisture), nighttime lights as a proxy for anthropogenic pressure, and static topographic attributes (elevation, slope, and aspect). All variables are temporally aggregated to annual values and spatially harmonised to a fixed WGS84 0.1° grid with identical extent and alignment across all years.A forest mask derived from the 2018 China Land-Use/Land-Cover Dataset is provided to enable forest-focused analyses, together with an annual forest fragmentation index (FFI) computed from high-resolution land-cover data using landscape metrics. Climate-zone identifiers based on an aggregated Köppen classification allow stratified analyses across China’s major bioclimatic regions.The dataset is distributed as annual GeoTIFF layers with comprehensive metadata and example Python and R workflows. All processing scripts are openly released, ensuring full reproducibility and compliance with FAIR data principles.