Introducing GeoLUCA: A Global Initiative to Map Land-Use Change and LandAbandonment in Mountain Ecosystems

Mountain landscapes worldwide are experiencing rapid transformations, driven by land abandonment, climate change, shifting socio-economic paradigms, and evolving disturbance regimes. Despite their ecological importance and their role as climate-sensitive sentinels, no coordinated global framework exists to compile and harmonize long-term land-use change (LUC) data in mountain areas.

To address this urgent gap, we introduce GeoLUCA, the Geodatabase of Land-Use Change in Alpine and mountain environments, on behalf of all the colleagues participating to this effort. GeoLUCA envisions a global, open, and dynamic platform integrating historical aerial imagery, remote sensing products, and ecological and socio-environmental datasets to quantify landscape change across mountain systems.

GeoLUCA has already taken shape as a regional effort within the European Alps, bringing together ca. 20 interdisciplinary partner institutions spanning ecology, geography, environmental informatics, and land-system science. GeoLUCA is currently working on three complementary and parallel areas of research that embody the scope and some of the expected outcomes of the initiative: (i) reconstructing two centuries of forest dynamics in the European Alps, combining land-cover data from multiple sources over the last 200 years, (ii) developing a deep-learning workflow for classifying raw historical aerial images, enabling consistent land-cover mapping across decades and mountain ranges, (iii) analysing habitat change trajectories in the European Alps since the 1950s to evaluate ecological shifts and emerging hotspots.

GeoLUCA is now launching a global data-collection effort to gather original aerial photographs, historical maps, and satellite time-series from mountain regions worldwide. This includes developing standards for metadata and curating raw imageries and associated ecological data sources from contributors across the world.  By building the first coordinated database of long-term LUC and land abandonment in mountains, GeoLUCA aims to support global change research, ecosystem modelling, evidence-based conservation, and policy design. We invite researchers to join the initiative and contribute data, expertise, and regional knowledge.