Rapid and Extensive Expansion of Shrub Encroachment into Grassland in Xilin Gol League, China.

Shrub encroached into grasslands threatens grassland ecosystems and negatively affects human land use and livelihood. However, existing research on this subject is limited, having focused on small areas, thus hindering a comprehensive understanding of the diverse patterns of large-scale shrub invasions into grasslands. In recent decades, a significant encroachment of shrubs into Xilin Gol grassland has been observed in China, resulting in considerable damage to the grasslands. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the rapid expansion of shrub-encroached grassland (SEG) from 1990 to 2020 in the Xilin Gol League, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, using long-term Landsat images. We classified land use/cover into seven types: arable land, bare land, forest, grassland, shrub-encroached grassland, built-up, and water. We obtained great accuracies in classification results (user accuracy, producer accuracy and overall accuracy are all > 0.8 and Kappa coefficient > 0.78) among seven study periods (1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020). More details about the dataset can be seen as following: Lv, X., Liu, J., Balzter, H., Dong, Z., Li, J., Zhang, W., and Guo, Y. (2024). Rapid and extensive expansion of shrub encroachment into grassland in Xilin Gol League, China, and its driving forces. Int. J. Appl. Earth Obs. Geoinf., 132, 104009.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jag.2024.104009 The dataset is organized in GeoTIFF format, WGS 1984 UTM Zone 50N (EPSG:32650), a universal Transverse Mercator corrdinate systembased on the WGS84 datum with units in meters and pixel size is 30m.