The 30 m land cover dataset for capturing land cover changes induced by ecological restoration from 1990 to 2022 on the Chinese Loess Plateau.

Continuous time-series of land cover is critical for attributing runoff, sediment and carbon changes on the Chinese Loess Plateau (CLP). However, current land cover products with annal temporal resolution lack spatial identification accuracy, particularly in capturing authentic changes of cropland, forest and grassland. To address these issues, a 30 m annual land cover dataset was proposed by the Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC_LPLC) for the CLP from 1990 to 2022. Different levels of land cover were classified using different combinations of spectral, monthly and annual temporal and topographic features and Random Forest classifier. Compared to other land cover products (45.64%-73.38%), the accuracy of YRCC_LPLC has a better performance with an overall accuracy of 85.16%. The YRCC_LPLC is capable of capturing not only the explicit spatial variation but also the change direction and change time of land cover, especially for the most critical conversion of cropland into forest and grassland induced by implementation of Grain to Green Program on the CLP.