The new decision support system TRENDS.EARTH
The TRENDS.EARTH tool was built as a multi-level decision support system which can be used for a range of analyses - from the effects of specific interventions on land condition to national level reporting to Sustainable Development Goal 15.3.
Using TRENDS.EARTH, even non-remote sensing experts can assess changes in primary productivity, land cover, and soil organic carbon at varying spatial and temporal scales. The user simply selects the period, area of analysis, and which set of indicators to compute, and the tool produces a set of easily to interpret maps and tables summarizing the trends identified. This simple to use QGIS plugin brings the computing power of Google Earth Engine and a suite of global datasets from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) and the European Space Agency, among other sources, to the hands of the non-super technical user. The tool was built as a multi-level decisions support system which can be used for analyzing from the effects of specific interventions on land condition to national level reporting to Sustainable Development Goal Indicator 15.3.1.
In-person capacity buildings workshops have taken place in Tanzania, Kenya, and South Africa since October 2017, and a suite of online resources (i.e. written documentation, video tutorials and webinars) are available online. With over 2,500 downloads already, TRENDS.EARTH has been very well received by the first users, who value the simplicity of the tool, its flexibility, and the free, wide-ranging datasets it uses. The tool has also captured the interest of the United Nationals Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which has invited Conservation International to participate in a series of global capacity building workshops that will take place during March and April of 2018. These additional workshops will focus on training over a hundred countries on reporting on Land Degradation Neutrality.
TRENDS.EARTH was created through a Global Environment Facility (GEF)-funded project in a collaboration between Conservation International, NASA, and Lund University. For more information on the tool visit TRENDS.EARTH (http://trends.earth) or send and email to trends.earth@conservation.org.
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