Data and code for: Urban expansion drives cross-boundary warming of protected forests without canopy degradation

This record contains the data and code supporting the findings of the manuscript "Urban expansion drives cross-boundary warming of protected forests without canopy degradation". It holds window-level tables for 2,096 paired windows of near-city and reference protected forest from 2003 to 2025: land surface temperature contrasts at the MODIS Aqua and Terra overpasses, urban pressure from three built-up datasets (GAIA, GHS-BUILT-S and WSF Evolution) and from SSP urban land projections, leaf area index, evapotranspiration, surface energy balance terms, ERA5-Land climate, forest cover, stand-replacing forest loss, satellite embedding contrasts and urban growth inside and outside protected-area boundaries. Python scripts recompute the main estimates of the study from these tables and the five cross-validated XGBoost models included here, and compare them with the published values. Protected-area boundaries and other source data are not redistributed. Data are released under CC BY 4.0 and code under the MIT License.