Abstract
A high-resolution, quantitative dataset of agricultural drought impacts is essential for advancing impact-based drought monitoring and prediction. Yet, such data remain the critical missing piece, representing the major obstacle to developing robust, impact-driven drought assessments. Here, we generated a 500 m-gridded agricultural drought-impacted area dataset in the China’s main grain region (ADIA-CMGR) during 2006–2020. We employ a leaf area index (LAI)-based relative threshold method to extract the areas with three degrees of drought impacts for summer-harvest crops, autumn-harvest crops, and early rice, respectively. The dataset constitutes various information, including drought-covered area, drought-damaged area, and crop failure area. Validation with the text-based qualitative records of agricultural drought-impacted areas shows that ADIA-CMGR offers accurate temporal variability and reasonable spatial distribution. The developed dataset satisfactorily revealed the spatial and inter-annual dynamics of agricultural drought-impacted areas across various crop-growing seasons, providing a solid foundation for managing drought impacts and improving agricultural practices.
Data availability
The complete ADIA-CMGR dataset is stored in the ZENODO repository and is available at https://zenodo.org/records/17940187 under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Code availability
The MATLAB code used to generate the agricultural drought-impacted area dataset in the China’s main grain region is available to the public at https://github.com/SJL-UCAS/ADAD_generate.
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Acknowledgements
This work is financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (grant no. 2022YFC3002804).
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Jiali Shi: conceptualization, methodology, software, visualization, data procession and writing; Yan-Fang Sang: conceptualization, methodology, supervision, funding, writing review and editing; Amir AghaKouchak: writing review and editing, Faith Ka Shun Chan: writing review and editing, Sonam Sandeep Dash: writing review and editing.
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Shi, J., Sang, YF., AghaKouchak, A. et al. A 500-m Agricultural Drought Impact Dataset in China’s Main Grain Region: Toward Impact-Based Drought Monitoring. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06732-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06732-3
