National forest carbon harvesting and allocation dataset for the period 2003 to 2018

Abstract. Forest harvesting is one of the anthropogenic activities that most significantly affect the carbon budget of forests. However, the absence of explicit spatial information on harvested carbon poses a huge challenge in assessing forest harvesting impacts, as well as the forest carbon budget. This study utilized provincial-level statistical data on wood harvest, the tree cover loss (TCL) dataset, and a satellite-based vegetation index to develop a Long-term harvEst and Allocation of Forest Biomass (LEAF) dataset. The aim was to provide the spatial location of forest harvesting with a spatial resolution of 30 m and quantify the post-harvest carbon dynamics. The validations against the surveyed forest harvesting at 133 cities and counties indicated a good performance of the LEAF dataset in capturing the spatial variation of harvested carbon, with a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.83 between the identified and surveyed harvested carbon. The linear regression slope was up to 0.99. Averaged from 2003 to 2018, forest harvesting removed 68.34 Mt C yr^-1, of which more than 80% was from selective logging. Of the harvested carbon, 22%, 45%, 4%, and 29% entered the wood fuel, wood products, paper products, and residual pools, respectively. Direct combustion of wood fuel was the primary source of carbon emissions after wood harvest. However, carbon can be stored in wood products for a long time, and by 2100, almost 90% of the harvested carbon during the study period will still be retained. This dataset is expected to provide a foundation and reference for estimating the forestry and national carbon budgets. The 30 m × 30 m harvested carbon dataset from forests in China can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23641164.v2 (Wang et al., 2023).