10-m resolution forest cover product of Qinghai-Xizang Plateau in 2021

The Tibetan Plateau is a crucial ecological system on the globe, and its forest cover status plays a significant role in global climate change and ecosystem protection. To obtain more accurate forest cover information of the Tibetan Plateau, this study generated a 10-meter resolution forest cover product of the Tibetan Plateau in 2021 based on Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 remote sensing data, and DEM data, employing an optimized random forest model. The main characteristic of the proposed method lies in the optimization of the random forest model's parameters and training features tailored to the complex land surface and vegetation types of the Tibetan Plateau, which effectively improves the model's accuracy and generalization ability. Accuracy verification results demonstrate that the overall accuracy and Kappa coefficient of the product are 98.29% and 0.9496, respectively, outperforming the existing ESA WorldCover 2020 product with 95.04% and 0.7712. This product provides high-resolution forest cover information for the Tibetan Plateau, which can serve as basic data for forest resource management, research on carbon storage and carbon cycle of forest ecosystems, and other studies in the Tibetan Plateau.