The Grain for Green Program (GGP), which combats and reverses the landscape-scale habitat degradation by converting agricultural lands to forests and grasslands, was launched in 1999 in western China. An assessment of the extent to which the GGP has altered the vegetation cover and ecological functions in these regions is much needed. The present study initially analyzed land use and cover change of forests and grasslands over western China between 2000 and 2015. A variety...