OpenLand: Software for Quantitative Analysis and Visualization of Land Use and Cover Change

Authors

Reginal Exavier, Federal University of Mato Grosso
Peter Zeilhofer, Federal University of Mato Grosso

Date of this Version

12-2020

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (December 2020) 12(2); Editor: Michael J. Kane

Comments

Copyright 2020, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 4.0 International

Abstract

There is an increasing availability of spatially explicit, freely available land use and cover (LUC) time series worldwide. Because of the enormous amount of data this represents, the continuous updates and improvements in spatial and temporal resolution and category differentiation, as well as increasingly dynamic and complex changes made, manual data extraction and analysis is highly time consuming, and making software tools available to automatize LUC data assessment is becoming imperative. This paper presents a software developed in R, which combines LUC raster time series data and their transitions, calculates state-of-the-art LUC change indicators, and creates spatio-temporal visualizations, all in a coherent workflow. The functionality of the application developed is demonstrated using an LUC dataset of the Pantanal floodplain contribution area in Central Brazil.