Remote Sensing and Geospatial Methods for Sustainable Land Systems
Creators: name: Akinyemi, Felicia O.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Land use
subject: Land use change
subject: Land degradation
subject: Remote sensing
subject: Climate Change
subject: Semi-arid land ecosystem
subject: Spatio-Temporal Analysis
subject: Social-Ecological Systems
subject: Land Degradation Neutrality (SDG15.3)

description: Increasing demand for land to provide food, feed, fibre, energy and shelter for more than eight billion people on the planet is driving changes to land use and land cover. Influencing climate, ecological processes, biodiversity and local and national economies, land use mirrors social and ecological interactions. Assessing land use is essential for formulating and implementing policies to minimize the impacts of land use change. Advances in geospatial technologies and the free availability of satellite image data from various sensors have provided the means to map, characterize and model land use changes. 

The research presented in this thesis reflects recent advances made in remote sensing and geospatial cloud computing technologies. It examines how the changes made to land use and land cover are linked to degrading processes in ecosystems. Land cover refers to the biophysical attributes of the land, whereas land use refers to the human imprint on land as relating to its use. Changes made to land systems, whether by humans and/or nature have profound effects on ecosystem functions and processes. Four recurrent themes in my research as presented in this thesis are as follows: i) Multidecadal assessment of land system change with remote sensing and GIS, ii) Linking Patterns to Processes with Remote Sensing and Ecology, iii) Understanding Climate and Land Use Change Relations, and iv) Advancing Approaches for Operationalizing and Validating the Land Degradation Neutrality — SDG 15.3.1 indicator.

With land system science as the application domain, my research has the goal of advancing the use of integrated satellite remote sensing image data capture and geospatial analytical approaches to investigate land system changes and their impacts such as land degradation. To achieve this goal, it maps and characterises land system changes by quantifying their extent and intensity using mainly remote sensing and field data. These forms the basis for linking the patterns of land system changes to ecosystem processes at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales in different Earth environments. Assessing land system changes involves mapping and quantifying transitions among broad land use types from an initial to a final year (e.g., the forest is converted to cropland between 2002 – 2014. Such a transition is not necessarily permanent over time as any of these three states are possible, i) forest transitions to another use (e.g., cropland); ii) forest remains unchanged; iii) forest transitions to cropland at an earlier period and re-converts back to forest afterwards due to cropland abandonment. A simple analysis of change between two-time steps may not capture such intermediate possible states. Thus, assessing the intensity and the direction of the observed changes during multiple time intervals is essential to better understand land system change.