Dataset of polygons with the contour of 900 juniper shrubs used to track shrub growth from 1977 to 2020 in Sierra Nevada (Spain) using very high resolution aerial and satellite RGB images.

This database provides as polygons the contours of 900 juniper shrubs (Juniperus communis L. and Juniperus sabina L.) along 5 decades (years 1977, 1984, 2001, 2010 and 2020). The contour of each of 900 shrubs manually mapped using the Google Satellite composite for the year 2020) was tracked back in time using orthophotos provided by REDIAM. Contours were obtained by manual annotation as polygon shapefiles in QGIS 3.10.3. Additionally, for the year 2020, the polygons were characterized with five attributes that gather ecological information: Morphotype (Hemispherical, Striped, Senescent, With rock), Presence of surrounding vegetation (Bare Soil, Surrounding Vegetation), Presence of nearby human land-uses (Surrounded by human facilities within 250 meters, Non-anthropized environment) Health status (as percentage of canopy cover with brown foliage: values between 0-5, where 0 corresponds to 100% photosynthetically active cover, decreasing the photosynthetically active cover until category 5 which corresponds to 100% damaged cover), and the subjective annotation certainty of the GIS technician (values between 0-5, where the value 0 corresponds to a very uncertain annotation up to the value 5 which corresponds to a fairly certain annotation).