LPS25 POSTER SESSION – Advancing Land-Use Research: Exploring the Potential and Limitations of Earth Observation for Monitoring Human Pressures on Ecosystems

At the ESA Living Planet Symposium 2025 in Vienna, LUISA will present a poster titled “Advancing Land-Use Research: Exploring the Potential and Limitations of Earth Observation for Monitoring Human Pressures on Ecosystems”.

POSTER ABSTRACT:

Land use is closely connected to essential components of the Earth System, such as climate, biodiversity, and biogeochemical cycles. Gaining a deeper understanding of land-use patterns and dynamics is crucial for evaluating their effects on these components and for developing strategies to promote sustainability. However, data of sufficient thematic detail required to analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics and drivers of land use, and in particular of land-use intensity and its changes over time, are currently lacking. The ongoing progress in Earth Observation (EO) imagery, both thematically and related to spatial resolution, allows for significant advances in monitoring changing patterns of land cover and land use. Various EO products tracking terrestrial surface characteristics are available in consistent time series, allowing for an improved analysis of spatiotemporal changes. However, EO only detects certain aspects of land use, such as vegetation types and land cover. Other aspects, such as land-use or management intensities remain difficult to capture. To address these knowledge and data gaps we present the LUIcube, a detailed global database on land use. It builds upon the ESA CCI land cover product and integrates statistical data on agricultural and forestry production to trace global land-use area and intensity developments annually from 1992 to 2020 for 32 land-use classes at 30 arcsecond resolution. The LUIcube focuses on Net Primary Production (NPP) as a key Earth System parameter vital for ecosystem and societal functioning, and applies the framework of Human Appropriation of NPP (HANPP) to assess changes in NPP induced by land conversion and land management in high detail. In this presentation, we use our experience in constructing the LUIcube to reflect and explore the potential and the limitations of EO to monitor and quantify human pressures on ecosystems, from global to local scales. Based on in-depth HANPP analyses for four case study regions in Africa, constructed within the Project “Land Use Intensity’s Potential, Vulnerability and Resilience for Sustainable Agriculture in Africa (LUISA)”, we illustrate the potential of EO to capture certain patterns and dynamics of NPP and its use by society, but also discuss the difficulties encountered when attempting to attribute EO signals to specific land-use practices. Although EO has a high potential to contribute to environmental monitoring and reporting, especially in regions such as the explored African case studies where statistical data might be incomplete, we identify domains where other data sources, such as census information or insights from stakeholder engagement, will remain essential. Our case studies show that appropriate strategies for data triangulation vary between land-use types and require a clear understanding of the various uncertainties and conceptual differences associated with specific types of data.