A dataset of monthly Vegetation Health Index at a resolution of 1 km for the Three-North Shelterbelt Program region from 2000 to 2024

Long-term monitoring of vegetation drought and recovery is the basis for evaluating ecological engineering initiatives across the TNSP. Based on multi-source datasets including MODIS vegetation index product (MOD13A3), land surface temperature product (MOD11A2), and monthly precipitation and potential evapotranspiration data, following data preprocessing such as QA quality control, gap-filling for missing values, and temporal smoothing, this study apply a multi-temporal scale standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) pixel-wise maximum correlation optimization weight method, to generate a monthly Vegetation Health Index (VHI) dataset at 1 km spatial resolution for the TNSP from 2000 to 2024.

Compared to the traditional fixed empirical weight of 0.5, the VHI dataset produced using the optimized weighting method exhibits significantly enhanced vegetation sensitivity in characterizing drought intensity variations. This dataset can provide fundamental data support for vegetation drought monitoring and its driving mechanism analysis, as well as assessment of ecological engineering implementation effectiveness in the TNSP.