25-year, quarterly land change maps of China's Loess Plateau reveal long-term and substantial water-induced soil erosion mitigation

Cheng, Mofan; Li, Zhuohong; Li, Linxin; He, Wei; Zhang, Liangpei; Zhang, Hongyan

doi:10.5194/essd-18-3303-2026

Articles | Volume 18, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3303-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3303-2026

© Author(s) 2026. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 5

Data description article

|

18 May 2026

Data description article |

| 18 May 2026

25-year, quarterly land change maps of China's Loess Plateau reveal long-term and substantial water-induced soil erosion mitigation

Mofan Cheng, Zhuohong Li, Linxin Li, Wei He, Liangpei Zhang, and Hongyan Zhang

Data sets

LP-QLC10: 25-year quarterly land change mapping in China’s Loess Plateau reveals long-term and substantial soil erosion mitigation Mofan Cheng et al. https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.33656

Short summary

This study presents a quarterly land-cover and soil erosion dataset for the Loess Plateau from 2000 to 2024 with 100 time steps, achieving an overall accuracy of 81.44 % based on 40 000 annotated samples and a mean absolute error of 4.50 % relative to government survey data. The maps show forest expansion, cropland expansion, and bare land reduction, together with a 30 % decline in mean soil erosion.