Mapping the spatiotemporal evolution of cropland-related soil erosion in China over the past four decades

This dataset provides spatially-explicit maps of cropland-related soil erosion in China at 30-m resolution from 1980 to 2018, generated under the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation Model. It contains gridded data for RUSLE factors (‘C_year.tif’, ‘R_year.tif’, ‘K_factor.tif’, ‘LS_factor.tif’, ‘P_factor.tif’), and the soil erosion rate for China’s croplands from 1980 to 2018 (‘A_year.tif’) as well as that for different crop types (‘A_cn.tif’). Here, ‘year’ specifies the specific year corresponding to the data, while ‘n’ refers to various crop types. All files are provided in single-band GeoTIFF format, which can be easily utilized by various mainstream GIS platforms, as well as programming languages such as Python and MATLAB. This dataset can fully support soil and water conservation in croplands and help safeguard stable food supply and sustainable agricultural practices.