Highway Encroachment on Chinese Forests from 1995 to 2020

52,703 kilometers of expressways encroached on plantation forests in China between 1995 and 2020, accounting for 72% of total forest encroachment. JinLing Du constructed this spatiotemporal dataset using six periods of expressway network data, forest distribution data, and multi-temporal remote sensing images. It quantifies encroachment length and spatial distribution for each five-year interval to support analysis of edge effects and forest recovery.

Use Cases

• Revealing spatiotemporal patterns of expressway encroachment on forests based on the multi-period overlay analysis.
• Quantifying edge effects on forest ecosystems based on the calculated encroachment lengths and spatial distributions.
• Comparing recovery capacity and sensitivity between plantation and natural forests based on the differentiated encroachment data.

Strengths

• Covers a 25-year time span from 1995 to 2020.
• Provides specific encroachment lengths: 52,703 km on plantation forests and 20,343 km on natural forests.
• Based on six periods of expressway network data and multi-temporal remote sensing images.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to its focus on China.

Provenance

Source

JinLing Du via figshare.

Collection Method

Constructed using spatial overlay analysis of expressway network data, forest distribution data, and multi-temporal remote sensing images.

Time Range

1995 to 2020

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-11 08:14:23; freshness should be verified.

Geography

China