Dataset on Ecological and Biophysical Mechanisms of Restoration for Enhancing Carbon Stocks in Drylands

<b>The effectiveness of natural climate solutions largely depends on how much ecological restoration can promote vegetation productivity, suppress carbon loss, and consequently enhance ecosystem carbon sink. In China, the potential of ecological restoration as natural climate solutions is primarily concentrated in dryland ecosystems in the vast North and Northwest areas, but this region is also vulnerable to carbon and nutrient losses due to soil erosion. It remains unclear whether the erosion-induced carbon and nutrient losses would undermine the effectiveness of ecological restoration in immobilizing carbon. Here, we provide a dataset derived from a 3.1 million km</b>^{<strong>2</strong>}<b> regional survey with 1599 degraded-and-restored plot pairs at 517 sites and a 13-year manipulative experiment mimicking wind erosion in China’s drylands. The dataset reveals the relative contributions of ecological (increasing plant carbon input) and biophysical (reducing erosion carbon loss) pathways to expanded ecosystem carbon stocks under ecological restoration.</b>