Three different data sources are used, including maps of the early Republic of China in 1920s, digital topographic maps in 1960 and Landsat MSS/TM/ETM+/OLI images from 1970 to 2020. In 1920s, the maps were scanned, geometrically corrected and georeferenced. In the 1960s, 1:250000 topographic maps were used. All maps are georeferenced by Albers Equivalent Conical Projection, and the root mean square (RMS) error is less than 1.5 pixels. For the early maps, visual interpretation and manual digitization were chosen to vectorize the lake boundaries. Since 1990, the semi-automatic water body classification method has been used to distinguish water body and non water body information from Landsat images, and then the lake boundary has been extracted, and visual inspection and manual editing have been carried out by comparing with the original Landsat images.

File naming and required software

The data include two parts, one is the Qinghai-Tibet plateau boundary and the other is the lake vector dataset. It can be used with software such as QGIS or ArcGIS.

Data Citations Data citation guideline What's data citation?

Cite as:

Zhang, G., Ran, Y. (2022). Time series dataset of lake area on Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for the past 100 years (1920-2020). A Big Earth Data Platform for Three Poles, DOI: 10.11888/Terre.tpdc.272891. CSTR: 18406.11.Terre.tpdc.272891. (Download the reference： RIS | Bibtex )

Using this data, the data citation is required to be referenced and the related literatures are suggested to be cited.

References literature

1.Zhang, G., Ran, Y., Wan, W., Luo, W., Chen, W., Xu, F., & Li, X. (2021). 100 years of lake evolution over the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Earth System Science Data, 13(8), 3951-3966, doi: 10.5194/essd-13-3951-2021 (View Details )

Support Program

Basic Science Center forTibetan Plateau Earth System (No:41988101-03)

Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (No:2019QZKK0201)

Copyright & License

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License： This work is licensed under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)