A dataset of land cover classifications with a spatial resolution of 30m in Mongolia in 2005 and 2015

The Mongolian Plateau is in the interior of Northeast Asia, and is extremely vulnerable to climate change and the deleterious effects of human activities. Mongolia is an important component unit of the Mongolian Plateau, and its resources, environment and ecological problems are closely related to the ecological barrier and resource security in northern China and the sustainable development of the China-Mongolia-Russia Corridor. However, there is still a lack of high-precision land cover data products suitable for the regional characteristics of Mongolia. In this study, according to the landscape pattern of Mongolia, we constructed a land cover classification system suitable for Mongolia; and based on the object-oriented remote sensing interpretation method, we adopted the split-scene interpretation to select a variety of indexes. According to certain rules and classification thresholds, we obtained a dataset of land cover classifications with a spatial resolution of 30m in Mongolia in 2005 and 2015. The land cover classifications of Mongolia includes 11 categories: forest, meadow steppe, real steppe, desert steppe, bare land, sand, desert, ice and snow, water, cropland and built areas. Based on multi-source validation point information and high-resolution Google Earth images, we completed an overall quality assessment and a single classification quality assessment of land cover classification results in Mongolia. In 2005, the overall classification accuracy is 78.85% and the Kappa coefficient is 0.77. In 2015, the overall classification accuracy is 80.49% and the Kappa coefficient is 0.78. The average annual classification accuracy is 79.67%, which meets the accuracy requirements. The dataset can directly reflect the changes of land cover pattern and trend in Mongolia and provide basic scientific data to support the sustainable development of Mongolia.