Groundwater-dependent vegetation in Saxony Anhalt (Germany)

Groundwater-dependent vegetation (GDV) creates 'green, wet and cold islands' within dry landscapes. Despite their importance in temperate climates, these biodiversity and geodiversity hotspots are largely unmapped outside of global drylands. This dataset provides all the necessary data and code to map GDV in a temperate climate in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany using random forest models with a 10 m spatial resolution for the period 2017 and 2024. It includes regional geospatial data and remote sensing data from ECOSTRESS and Sentinel-2, which were used to produce eight predictor variables for the random forest models. A total of 181 ground-truth vegetation plots (10 m × 10 m) were collected in summers 2023 and 2024, and were reclassified as GDV or non-GDV based on phreatophyte coverage within each plot and the groundwater table depth. A total of 166 vegetation plots were used to train and validate four random forest models to predict GDV in a temperate climate in the study region of Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.