Soil health in a conflict-affected area: An open-source Google Earth Engine framework to map land degradation in Gaza

Abstract

Armed conflict accelerates soil and vegetation degradation, but field assessments and monitoring are often only possible at a later stage and/or indirectly, for example, through remote sensing data. We used the Dynamic World v1, a land-cover open-source dataset derived from Sentinel-2 imagery, to quantify land-cover change in Gaza (Palestinian territories) between September 2023 and September 2025. After cloud/shadow masking and 10 m spatial estimation, cropland and grassland declined from 5941 to 2056 ha (−65%), while bare soil expanded from 3918 to 17,663 ha (+351%). A comparator region in Israel showed modest changes (−4.5% and +3.4%, respectively), indicating that the Gaza trends are conflict-related rather than regional. High-resolution imagery reveals widespread transition from vegetated surfaces to debris fields and exposed soils. Our findings corroborate recent analyses based on commercial imagery while extending the assessment to 2025 through a fully open-source workflow. We present a fully reproducible workflow in Google Earth Engine to document and quantify land degradation using open Earth observation data under conditions of restricted ground access. These results provide a quantitative baseline for assessing soil and vegetation damage in conflict-affected areas.