Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Oil seed crops, especially oil palm, are among the most rapidly expanding agricultural land uses, and their expansion is known to cause significant environmental damage. Accordingly, these crops often...
Forests are the most biologically diverse land ecosystems and are critical for sustaining local and global livelihoods. Deforestation can be considered a type of land degradation when forest ecosystem...
Fire is a natural part of all ecosystems. Wildfires have been burning vegetation and shaping landscapes far longer than people have been on Earth. However, changes in fire frequency and timing can res...
Changes in vegetation biomass are critical in assessing land degradation. Climate variations, alone or in combination with human-induced land use and land change, can affect biomass productivity and m...
Water is a critical natural resource for both natural ecosystems and human subsistence. Some of the most immediate pressures on land that lead to degradation include diversion of surface waters and th...
Humans need increasingly more biomass for food, fodder, fibre and energy. Meeting these demands changes global ecosystems. Tracking changes in total biomass production or land productivity is an essen...
Aridity represents the ‘dryness’ of the climate. Dry areas have a higher potential for land degradation. This layer displays the areas of concern for aridity related issues derived from the convergenc...
According to UN estimates, the global population will increase by 2.4 billion between 2015 and 2050. Of this, an overwhelming 50 % will be concentrated in Africa (1.3 billion). There could be up to fo...
Some extraordinary changes have occurred across the globe over the past decades regarding human habitation. Globally, between 1975 and 2015 built-up areas increased by approximately 250 %, while popul...
The human imprint on the planet has a major impact on the functioning of the Earth system. Because the impact on the environment is closely intertwined with population dynamics, it is important to mon...