1 km annual forest cover and plant functional type dataset for China from 1981 to 2023

This dataset provides two main sets of annual raster data products for the China region at a 1 km spatial resolution: forest cover from 1981 to 2023, and plant functional types (PFT) from 1981 to 2023. Additionally, it contains detection results for change events, including forest change (gain and loss) for the 1981–2023 period. These change products specify the start year and duration of each event.These data products were generated by integrating spatial constraints from multi-source remote sensing data with provincial-level statistics from China’s National Forest Inventories (NFIs). From the primary forest cover dataset, an annual PFT dataset was further developed, disaggregating the total forest cover into nine distinct types. The dataset aims to provide a high-quality, long-term, and spatially explicit forcing dataset suitable for Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) to support studies on China's terrestrial carbon balance, assess the ecological impacts of forest restoration, and constrain estimates of the national forest carbon sink since 1981.