Nighttime light (NTL)

China has experienced a rapid urbanization over the past three decades, resulting in a prominent “urban core-suburban-rural” (USR) triad structure of human settlements. The USR disparities, which are related to the spatial variations of human activity intensity, have significant impacts on the spatiotemporal variations in various environmental issues such as carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, carbon storage, water quality, etc. However, there is a lack of national-level, long-term USR dataset compared to the large number of “Urban-Rural” dual structure datasets.