Trends.Earth
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Trends.Earth

Use this tool to
Calculate the UN SDG 15.3.1 indicator (proportion of land area that is degraded) and its sub-indicators (change in land productivity, change in soil organic carbon, and change in land cover); report SDG 15.3.1 indicator to the UNCCD reporting platform (PRAIS3/4)
End Product(s)
Maps (GeoTIFF files) of change in productivity, change in soil organic carbon, change in land cover, and the overall SDG 15.3.1 land degradation indicator; Excel table reporting the total land area that was degraded/improved/stable for the overall SDG 15.3.5 indicator and the sub-indicators (land productivity, soil organic carbon, land cover) for your area of interest Trends.Earth was designed for countries to monitor the achievement of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) 15.3. It is a desktop-based tool that leverages Earth observation satellite data as a plug-in of the open-source geospatial platform Quantum GIS (QGIS) to monitor land degradation against a baseline and target year. The tool calculates three separate indicators of landscape degradation: change in land productivity, change in land cover, and changes in soil organic carbon. The results of three indicators can be combined into a single SDG 15.3.1 indicator, which defines area as degraded, stable, or improved. Trends.Earth results are packaged as maps and summary tables that tabulate total land area within each category (e.g., degraded, stable, improved) in an output Excel spreadsheet.

The three indicators used to calculate the SDG can be customized to suit the user’s needs by adjusting the period of analysis and various input datasets (i.e. default global datasets or custom finer spatial resolution datasets). The resolution of default integrated satellite data inputs range from 250-m to 8-km and the outputs are maps of each of the three indicators. In addition to monitoring progress towards UN SDG 15.3.1, countries have been successfully using Trends.Earth to report on their LDN commitments to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The tool can be applied at global, regional, national scale using default data, but also at regional, national or subnational scales when using custom data to inform land use planning and to monitor land degradation and sustainable land management activities.

Scale
Landscape
Technical skills/resources required
Internet connection, QGIS version 3.22 or greater
Cost
Free
Language(s) available
Arabic, Swahili, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese