The future of global land change monitoring

Abstract

Land change science co-evolves with remote sensing technology. The world has witnessed an exponential growth in Earth observation satellites since 1972, and concurrently, land change research has experienced transformative advancement. This review summarizes the major milestones in global land cover and change mapping in a chronological order, from the pioneering efforts in the 1980s to the latest innovations at present, illustrating the tremendous progress in monitoring global land change from space. The second part of the review presents a critical synopsis of the recent progress in land change research, focusing on the technical aspects of temporal trends characterization, change mapping and area estimation, as well as the applied aspects of driver attribution and the complex consequences to the Earth system and human society. The last part of the article offers insights in the strategic directions of land change monitoring, including generation of analysis ready data, application of artificial intelligence algorithms, reconstruction of historical land change records, and near-real-time land change monitoring. Land change science will continue to play a vital role in addressing a wide range of global challenges, including climate change and carbon sequestration, food security, sustainable energy transition, natural disaster relief and environmental change in conflicted societies.