Reservoir inventory for China in 2016 and 2021

Reservoir inventories are essential for investigating the impact of climate change and anthropogenic activities on water scape changes. They provide fundamental data sources to explore the sustainability and management efficiency of water resources. However, publicly released reservoir inventories are currently limited to a single temporal domain. As a result, the effectiveness of governmental policy implementation on water resources remains to be explored due to the lack of multi-time datasets. In this study, we generated a reservoir inventory for China for the years 2016 and 2021 with an overall accuracy of 99.71%. The reservoirs were visually interpreted from annually composited Landsat images, and each reservoir is represented by a polygon with attributes of reservoir name, area and storage capacity. About 10.32% of the reservoirs have increased storage capacity from 2016 to 2021, while 22.73% have decreased. Most provinces and river basins in China have expanded their accumulated storage capacity from 2016 to 2021.