Monitoring the Spatiotemporal Expansion of Wastewater Treatment Plants in China Using Satellite Observations

This dataset provides a nationwide spatiotemporal inventory of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in China (baseline year 2022), focusing on WWTPs that contain sedimentation tanks identifiable from high-resolution satellite imagery. The dataset records the geographic coordinates and construction-year categories of WWTPs across China, enabling analyses of long-term infrastructure expansion and spatial distribution patterns. Based on this dataset, China’s total number of WWTPs increased from 671 (2000) to 4,596 (2021), with clear spatial inequality and an east–west gradient in WWTP concentration. The dataset supports applications in environmental management, water resource planning, and spatiotemporal infrastructure research, and the mapping framework is designed to be transferable to other regions and infrastructure types. Data format A tabular file with one row per WWTP record. Fields ID: Unique identifier for each WWTP record. Latitude: Geographic latitude in decimal degrees. Longitude: Geographic longitude in decimal degrees. Construction_Year: Construction year derived from time series imagry (e.g., before2000, 2000, …, 2021). Province_code: Province-level administrative code (China GB/T-style numeric code; used for aggregation and spatial statistics).