Changes of Chinese forest-grassland ecotone in geographical scope and landscape structure from 1990 to 2020

Forest-grassland ecotone (FGE) has essential ecological and economic value. Unfortunately, it is impacted greatly by environmental changes and anthropogenic disturbance, and is considered one of the most severely threatened biomes in China. To protect Chinese FGE, identifying its exact boundary and exploring its landscape structure dynamic are badly needed, especially on nationwide scale at one-year temporal resolution. Here, we mapped the annual FGE distribution of China from 1990 to 2020, investigated its changing trends of area, location and landscape patterns, and revealed the underlying driving factors. Our results showed that FGE area over the 31 years totaled 1,011,870 km2, covering about 10.54% of China’s land. The FGE area first increased from 1990 and peaked in 1999, and then kept decreasing until 2020. The FGE gravity center has moved accumulatively 590.15 km over the 31 years, with the net moving distance of 228.76 km southwestward. From 1990 to 2020, forest area increased c..., We combined spatial autocorrelation and spatial clustering methods to obtain Chinese forest-grassland ecotone(FGE) distribution. We mapped the FGE boundary from 1990 to 2020 in the following six steps: i) We generated a grid map with a cell size of 1.5km×1.5km in the study region and calculated the percentage of forest and grassland in each grid cell based on land cover map using ArcGIS10.7; ii) Using local spatial autocorrelation in the GeoDa V1.6.7, we produced two maps of spatial clustering, i.e., the clustering results of forest and grassland that separately include five circumstances including High-High (HH), Low-Low (LL), High-Low (HL), Low-High (LH), and Not Significant (NS), where “High” and “Low” before and after the short dash represents the forest/grassland coverage in the examined grid and its surrounding ones respectively, and “Not Significant” represents other circumstances than above-mentioned; iii) According to the paired forest and grassland clustering results, we obtai..., , # Changes of Chinese forest-grassland ecotone in geographical scope and landscape structure from 1990 to 2020

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7sqv9s517](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7sqv9s517)

We have submitted the distribution of Chinese forest-grassland ecotone in 31-years.

File naming: the data is stored in Shapefile vector data format. The file named \"forest-grassland ecotone\" records the extend of Chinese forest-grassland ecotone. The geographic area of forest-grassland ecotone ranges from 88°30′ E to 122°59′ E and from 27°28′ N to 51°05′ N. The total area of forest-grassland ecotone was 1,011,870 km2, covering about 10.54% of China’s land.

Data reading method: software or computer language that can read ShapeFile can read the data, such as ArcGIS, envi, IDL, python, MATLAB, etc.