A multi-source dissolved carbon dataset for China's inland waters over the past three decades: concentration,...

A precise evaluation of carbon (C) concentration, storage, and flux dynamics in China's inland waters is essential for assessing the global C sink capacity of aquatic ecosystems and for understanding regional biogeochemical cycles. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive, spatially explicit, and long-term dataset that quantifies applicable parameters. To address this significant data gap, here we provide a comprehensive dataset that systematically records the concentration, storage, and flux dynamics of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) across China's rivers, lakes, and reservoirs over a long timescale. This dataset is meant to consolidate and standardize historical measurements from published literature, field surveys, remote sensing inversion processes, and model simulations since the 1960s. The dataset includes dissolved carbon (DC) records from China's lakes (3,515), reservoirs (841), and rivers (32,735) that span decades, namely, from 1960 to 2022, as well as basin-scale C storage and flux data from the 1990s to the 2010s. The dataset is intended to serve as a fundamental resource for quantifying the role of China's inland waters within the global C cycle, for validating C assessment models, and for informing water quality and climate change policies.