A global map of planting years of plantations

Abstract

Plantation is an important land use type that differs from natural forests and affects the economy and the environment. Tree age is one of the key factors used to quantify the impact of plantations. However, there is a lack of datasets explicitly documenting the planting years of global plantations. Here we used time-series Landsat archive from 1982 to 2020 and the LandTrendr algorithm to generate global maps of planting years based on the global plantation extent products in Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. The datasets developed in this study are in a GeoTIFF format with 30-meter spatial resolution by recording gridded specie types and planting years of global plantations. The derived dataset could be used for yield prediction of tree crops and social and ecological cost-benefit analysis of plantations.