Abstract
Forests represent important habitats for species and provide multiple ecosystem services for human well-being. Preserving forests and other terrestrial ecosystems has become crucial to halt desertification, land degradation, and biodiversity loss worldwide, and is also one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. Remote sensing could greatly contribute to measuring progress toward SDGs by providing consistent and repetitive coverage of large areas, as well as information in various wavelengths, which facilitates the monitoring of environmental trends at various scales. This paper focuses on SDG indicator 15.1.1—“Forest area as a percentage of total land area” to demonstrate the potential of Earth Observation Data Cubes for SDGs. The approach presented here uses Landsat Analysis Ready Data (ARD) stored in the Swiss Data Cube, and offers a complementary method to ground-based approaches to monitor Switzerland’s forest extent based on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). The proposed method performs time-series analyses to extract a forest/non-forest map and a graph representing the trend of SDG 15.1.1 indicator over time. Preliminary results suggest that this approach can identify similar forest extent and growth patterns to observed trends, and can therefore help monitor progress toward the selected SDG indicator more effectively.
Highlights
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed by the international community in 2015, are an ensemble of 17 goals supported by 169 targets to address environmental and social economic challenges worldwide [1]
The joint United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE)/Eurostat/Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) working group on statistics are working on identifying good practices to assist governments in the design of sustainable development indicators to be used at national level [3]
This paper focuses on SDG 15—“Life on Land” and presents an alternative approach to ground-based measurements for monitoring target 15.1–indicator 15.1.1—forest area as a percentage of total land area—using the Swiss Data Cube
Summary
The metadata for SDG 15.1.1 [2] does not specify any requirements for the type of data, but explains that all national data should be compiled and provided to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) following their standard format for country reporting, which includes original data, descriptions of their use, and reference sources. Complementary approaches such as remote sensing could help improve the comparability and scalability of national progress measurements, but no alternatives are proposed in the SDG metadata
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
