Principal Investigator: Matthew Hansen Co Investigators: Peter Potapov, Alexandra Tyukavina, Svetlana Turubanova, Amy Hudson Pickens, Viviana Zalles, Xiao-Peng Song Sponsor: WRI Land & Carbon Lab, Bezos Earth Fund Time Period: 2021 to 2026 Researchers: Andrés Hernández SernaEmma MinnisAhmad Khan Graduate Researchers: Aleksandra Mikus Haijun Li Abstract The project is aimed at building and implementing a global land cover and land use monitoring system with outputs suitable for tracking global environmental change over the next 5 years. Land cover and land use is a first order measure of environmental dynamics, foundational to enabling downstream applications concerning carbon emissions and sequestration, changes to land surface temperature and albedo, impacts on hydrologic systems, and losses of biodiversity. Global land cover and land use themes include: • Annual tree cover, consisting of tree cover extent, and gross gain and loss per pixel and land use/change factors attributed, including fire, disease, storm and other natural causes, and mechanical disturbance characterized into forestry, smallholder agriculture and deforestation categories; a final product will discriminate major commodity forestry/plantation types, including palm and rubber • Annual short vegetation cover, which in year two will be divided into shrub and herbaceous components and in year three pasture land attributed • Annual surface water, with change dynamics characterized into permanent loss/gain, and intra-annual and inter-annual dynamics • Annual permanent ice • Annual permanent cropland extent with each year having a commodity crop added as a sub-category, including soybean, wheat, maize, rice and sugar cane • Annual built-up land with subsequent subcategories of settlements and infrastructure, settlements further subdivided into residential and commercial land uses and infrastructure divided into roads versus other transportation types • Annual bare ground, with gains attributed to mining and natural causes • Wetlands will be mapped as a static layer used with other topographic information to disaggregate land cover and land use dynamics by climate/ecozones. Project Description Preliminary project results: Global Land Cover Change map prototype: https://www.landcarbonlab.org/data#global-land-cover-change 2019 Land Cover and Land Use map: https://glad.umd.edu/dataset/global-land-cover-land-use-v1 Global Land Cover and Land Use Change, 2000-2020: https://glad.umd.edu/dataset/GLCLUC2020 Related Publications: Khan, A., Potapov, P., Hansen, M. C., Pickens, A. H., Tyukavina, A., Serna, A. H., Uddin, K., and Ahmad, J. (2024) Perennial snow and ice cover change from 2001 to 2021 in the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region derived from the Landsat analysis-ready data. Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment, v. 34, 101192. Parker, D., Tosiani, A., Yazid, M., Sari, I. L., Kartika, T., Kustiyo, Firmansyah, R., Said, Z., Wijaya, A., Potapov, Tyukavina, A., Stehman, S.V., Zalles, V., Pickens, A., Pickering, J., Turubanova, S., Hansen, M. C. (2024) Land in limbo: Nearly one third of Indonesia’s cleared old-growth forests left idle. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(28), e2318029121. Turubanova, S., Potapov, P., Hansen, M. C., Li, X., Tyukavina, A., Pickens, A. H., Hernandez-Serna, ... & Stolle, F. (2023). Tree canopy extent and height change in Europe, 2001–2021, quantified using Landsat data archive. Remote Sensing of Environment, 298, 113797. Potapov, P., Hansen, M. C., Turubanova, S., Tyukavina, A., Zalles, V., Song, X. P., & Khan, A. (2023). Reply to: Measuring the world’s cropland area. Nature Food, 4(1), 33-34. Potapov, P., Turubanova, S., Hansen, M.C., Tyukavina, A., Zalles, V., Khan, A., Song, X-P, Pickens, A., Shen, Q., Cortez, J. (2022) Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. Nature Food, 3, 19-28 Hansen, M.C., Potapov, P.V., Pickens, A., Tyukavina, A., Hernandez Serna, A., Zalles, V., Turubanova, S., Kommareddy, I., Stehman, S.V., Song, X-P (2022) Global land use extent and dispersion within natural land cover using Landsat data. Environmental Research Letters Potapov, P., Hansen, M.C., Pickens, A., Hernandez-Serna, A., Tyukavina, A., Turubanova, S., Zalles, V., Li, X., Khan, A., Stolle, F., Harris, N., Song, X-P, Baggett, A., Kommareddy, I., Kommareddy, A. (2022) The global 2000-2020 land cover and land use change dataset derived from the Landsat archive: first results. Frontiers in Remote Sensing Related Projects: Global Forest Watch