Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Monitoring land degradation at national level using satellite Earth Observation time-series data to support SDG15 – exploring the potential of data cube

Published inBig Earth Data, p. 1-20
Publication date2020
Abstract

Avoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation and restoring degraded land is an urgent priority to protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services that are vital to life on Earth. To halt and reverse the current trends in land degradation, there is an immediate need to enhance national capacities to undertake quantitative assessments and mapping of their degraded lands, as required by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular, the SDG indicator 15.3.1 (“proportion of land that is degraded over total land area”). Earth Observations (EO) can play an important role both for generating this indicator as well as complementing or enhancing national official data sources. Implementations like Trends.Earth to monitor land degradation in accordance with the SDG15.3.1 rely on default datasets of coarse spatial resolution provided by MODIS or AVHRR. Consequently, there is a need to develop methodologies to benefit from medium to high-resolution satellite EO data (e.g. Landsat or Sentinels). In response to this issue, this paper presents an initial overview of an innovative approach to monitor land degradation at the national scale in compliance with the SDG15.3.1 indicator using Landsat observations using a data cube but further work is required to improve the calculation of the three sub-indicators.

Keywords
  • Land degradation
  • Sustainable development goals
  • Open data cube
  • Landsat
  • Sentinel-2
  • SDG15.3.1
Funding
  • European Commission - The European network for observing our changing planet [689443]
Citation (ISO format)
GIULIANI, Gregory et al. Monitoring land degradation at national level using satellite Earth Observation time-series data to support SDG15 – exploring the potential of data cube. In: Big Earth Data, 2020, p. 1–20. doi: 10.1080/20964471.2020.1711633
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
Identifiers
Journal ISSN2096-4471
494views
387downloads

Technical informations

Creation16/01/2020 15:50:00
First validation16/01/2020 15:50:00
Update time24/10/2025 13:30:35
Status update24/10/2025 13:30:35
Last indexation24/10/2025 13:35:00
All rights reserved by Archive ouverte UNIGE and the University of GenevaunigeBlack