China planted forest data
The dataset is a subset of the large dataset produced by Tang et al. (2018), including 1928 planted forest sites collected from a national field campaign performed in China in the early 2010s. During the field campaign, the mainland China was first divided into three regions in a standardized, sampling protocol. The sampling protocol was enforced to ensure the forest sites sampled are representative of the distribution, composition, and structure of the forests in China. In each of the three regions, the grid sizes of 100, 400, and 900 km2 were adopted for tropical/subtropical, temperate, and alpine regions, respectively. Second, 3%–5% of the grids were randomly chosen for the field survey by overlaying the grids and the administrative boundary maps. Third, a 600-1000 m2 plot was designed for each forest site (i.e. plot) for data sampling. During the field surveying, each plot was further divided into six to ten 10 × 10 m2 subplots, and the geographical information, forest origin, community type, the diameter at breast height (DBH), and stand age were recorded. For each plot, trees with DBH larger than 5 cm were all measured, and the biomass of each tree was estimated with 158 sets of allometric equations (including each dominant tree species in China). The field sampling was conducted from June to September to minimize bias. By excluding planted forests with missing age information and sites established before 1980, 1928 sites were retained. The dataset was used in this study published in One Earth: "China’s forestation on marginal lands was less efficient in carbon sequestration compared to non-marginal lands"
