Forests play a critical role as terrestrial carbon sinks in mitigating climate change. However, accurate quantification of soil respiration ( R s )—the primary CO 2 efflux from forests—remains challenging due to existing studies' overreliance on annual‐scale estimates, which obscure fine‐scale spatiotemporal dynamics and key drivers of R s . Here, we developed a 500 m resolution monthly R s dataset for China's forests (2000–20...