A high-resolution gridded grazing dataset of grassland ecosystem on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau in 1982–2015

Grazing intensity, characterized by high spatial heterogeneity, is a vital parameter to accurately depict human disturbance and its effects on grassland ecosystems. Grazing census data provide useful county-scale information; however, they do not accurately delineate spatial heterogeneity within counties, and a high-resolution dataset is urgently needed. Therefore, we built a methodological framework combining the cross-scale feature extraction method and a random forest model to spatialize census data after fully considering four features affecting grazing, and produced a high-resolution gridded grazing dataset on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau in 1982–2015. The proposed method (R(2) = 0.80) exhibited 35.59% higher accuracy than the traditional method. Our dataset were highly consistent with census data (R(2) of spatial accuracy = 0.96, NSE of temporal accuracy = 0.96) and field data (R(2) of spatial accuracy = 0.77). Compared with public datasets, our dataset featured a higher temporal resolution (1982–2015) and spatial resolution (over two times higher). Thus, it has the potential to elucidate the spatiotemporal variation in human activities and guide the sustainable management of grassland ecosystem.