A dataset of spatial distribution of highland barley planting area on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (2019)

Highland barley is the dominant crop that can best adapt to the natural environment of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau characterized by Alpine low temperature, hypoxia and strong radiation. In order to obtain the spatial distribution of the highland barley planting areas on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, we adopted a highland barley extraction method based on multi-element fusion of partition classification. First, we impose restrictions on the range of highland barley map spots of different agricultural partitions in terms of altitude, slope, precipitation and hydrological factors. Second, we optimized the optimal band for highland barley extraction through the OIF index partition. Finally, we used the object-oriented classification method to extract the planting areas of highland barley on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The accuracy test of confusion matrix shows that the overall accuracy is 91.74% and Kappa coefficient is 0.83. According to the extraction results of highland barley on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the total planting area of highland barley is about 2.74×105 hm2. The dataset improves the understanding of the existing highland barley spatial distribution pattern from the administrative unit scale to the patch scale. And it can provide data reference for optimizing the spatial distribution pattern of highland barley planting in the future.