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Modern pollen datasets are essential for pollen-based quantitative paleoclimate (e.g. precipitation) reconstructions, which can aid to better understand recent climate change and its underlying forcing mechanisms. A modern pollen dataset based on surface sediments from 90 lakes in the shrub, meadow, steppe and desert regions of the central and western Tibetan Plateau (TP) was established to fill geographical gaps left by previous datasets. Ordination analyses of pollen data and climatic parameters revealed that annual precipitation is the dominant factor for modern pollen distribution on the central and western TP. A regional transfer function for annual precipitation was developed with the weighted averaging partial least squares (WAPLS), which suggests a good inference power of the modern pollen dataset for annual precipitation. A case study in which the transfer function was effectively applied to a fossil pollen record from Lake Tangra Yumco on the central TP for paleoprecipitation reconstruction demonstrated the significance of the modern pollen dataset in less data region for paleoclimate change studies. Data from this study are openly available via the Zenodo portal (Ma et al., 2023; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8008474). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]