CCD-Rice: A long-term paddy rice distribution dataset in China at 30 m resolution

Abstract. As one of the most widely cultivated grain crops, paddy rice is a vital staple food in China and plays a crucial role in ensuring food security. Over the past decades, the planting area of paddy rice in China has shown substantial variability. Yet, there are no long-term high-resolution rice distribution maps in China, which hinders our ability to estimate greenhouse gas fluxes and crop production. This study developed a new optical satellite-based rice mapping method using a machine learning model and appropriate data preprocessing strategies to address the challenges of cloud contamination and missing data in optical remote sensing observations. This study produced CCD-Rice (China Crop Dataset-Rice), the first high-resolution rice distribution dataset in China from 1990 to 2016. Based on 391,659 validation samples, the overall accuracy of the distribution maps in each provincial administrative region averaged 90.26 %. Compared with 20,759 county-level statistical data, the coefficients of determination (R²) of single- and double-season rice in each year averaged 0.84 and 0.80, respectively. The distribution maps can be obtained at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.15865 (Shen et al., 2024a).