It is of practical significance for optimizing and adjusting the farmland spatial utilization and maintaining regional food security to identify the spatial distribution of farmland resources. Farmland space research depends on the land use data that accurately reflects the spatial information. At present, the resolution of existing land use data is low, ranging from 10 m to 8 km. Among them, the 30 m-resolution land use data compiled using the Landsat images, as released by the Resource and Environmental Science and Data Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are the highest resolution and long-term series data product available for China. However, by high-resolution image interpretation and field verification, we found that the dataset involved large deviations and uncertainties, mainly due to the reasons that the farmland in Tibetan Plateau (TP) was fragmented with small parcels, and thus cannot be accurately extracted from the Landsat images. To this end, the 1 m-resolution farmland dataset was visually interpreted from Google Earth high-resolution images in this study, which contained farmland of the TP in 2018, and that of the Three River Region (TRR) and Huangshui River Basin (HRB) in 2000 and 2018. The objects in the Google Earth high-resolution images were clearly distinguishable, and the farming characteristics of land were obvious, ensuring the accuracy of the interpretation results. In addition, this study randomly checked 230 plots collected by field surveys in 2018–2021, finding that 95.22% of the farmland parcels has been correctly identified, which further improved the reliability of the interpreted farmland dataset. This farmland dataset can provide references for farmland and agriculture research in the TP.

Spatial farmland dataset contains 5 shp files, namely Farmland in the TP in 2018, Farmland in the TRR in 2000, Farmland in the TRR in 2018, Farmland in the HRB in 2000, and Farmland in the HRB in 2018, respectively, which can be read by ArcGIS software. County-level farmland area data are stored per county in Excel format, named as Farmland_county.xls. And the farmland altitude information data is stored in the attribute table of spatial farmland data in shp format.