Data on cropland abandonment in Youyang County

Constrained by the inherent limitations of traditional monitoring technologies and methodologies, existing studies not only face challenges in capturing the fine-grained characteristics of cropland abandonment within county boundaries but also commonly suffer from biases in area estimation—issues that may compromise the precision of cropland protection policy formulation. Leveraging the Google Earth Engine (GEE) cloud platform, this study integrated the Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SNIC) segmentation method, random forest model, and LandTrendr (LT) algorithm to conduct a focused investigation into the spatiotemporal distribution of cropland abandonment in Youyang County. Furthermore, the GeoDetector model was employed to disentangle the natural, social, and economic driving factors underlying cropland abandonment in the study area.