A dataset on land cover from 1990 to 2015 in Mongolia

Mongolian Plateau locates in the interior of Eurasia, far from the sea, is extremely vulnerable to climate change and the deleterious effects of human activity. As one of the indicators in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), land degradation combating is a big challenge in Mongolia, located in the corp part of MP. By means of the object-oriented remote sensing interpretation, we obtained the refined land cover data of Mongolia in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 with 30-m resolution. The land cover classification of Mongolian contains 11 categories, including forest, meadow steppe, real steppe, desert steppe, barren, sand, desert, ice, water, cropland, and built area. Their corrsponding codes in the attribute table of the dataset are 11, 21, 22, 23, 72, 71, 73, 31, 51, 41, and 61, respectively. Their overall classification accuracies were 82.26%, 82.77%, 92.34%, and 92.75%, respectively. It can be found that the land cover of Mongolia has obvious law of zonal gradual changes. From north to south are forest, real steppe, desert steppe, and barren land, and the vegetation coverage progressively decreases. This dataset can provide scientific data support for sustainable development in Northeast Asia and achieving the goal of Land Degradation Neutrality. <br>