Visualising high-resolution global land use change of six decades

People have shaped the land surface for many centuries. However, the global expansion of land use is fuelling climate change and threatening biodiversity. At the same time, there is an ever-increasing need to supply our growing world population with food, energy and materials. Despite the crucial role of land use for solving global sustainability challenges, existing data on long-term land use change lacks the spatial, temporal and thematic detail to comprehensively capture the changes in its full dynamics.

We synergistically combined multiple open data streams (remote sensing-based land cover maps, land use reconstructions and statistics) to examine the spatio-temporal patterns of global land use change of global land use change. For this, we developed the HIstoric Land Dynamics Assessment+ (HILDA+), a modelling framework providing data-derived, annual gross changes between six land use/cover categories (urban, cropland, pasture/rangeland, forest, unmanaged grass/shrubland, sparse/no vegetation) at a spatial resolution of 1km and for a reference period of 1960-2020. Derived land use/cover maps are published as Open Data.

In this live demo, we present our findings through an interactive map viewer - a visualisation of global land use change of the past six decades. The data visualisation builds on the open-source server GeoServer. We will interactively explore the extent of land use change and its diverging patterns across the globe.