The NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program: Past Achievements and Current Advances

Dear Colleagues,

The NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC) Program was established in the mid-1990s to address the growing need to understand how human activities and natural processes alter the Earth’s land surface.  It was part of NASA’s early efforts to understand global environmental change, complementing NASA programs such as the Earth Observing System and the Mission to Planet Earth. Recognizing that land-use changes, such as deforestation, urbanization, agriculture, and fire regimes, have profound impacts on ecosystems and human well-being, NASA designed the program to leverage Earth observations for systematic monitoring and analysis. The NASA LCLUC Program gradually expanded its focus from mapping land-cover changes to understanding the drivers and impacts of land-use and land-cover dynamics. During the first decade since its inception, LCLUC invested considerable effort in integrated interdisciplinary research, combining remote sensing with modeling and socioeconomic data to assess land-change consequences for the carbon cycle, climate, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. The program facilitated international collaborations with U.S. scientists, particularly in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where rapid land-cover changes were occurring. Those collaborations were essential for testing novel algorithms, calibrating and validating NASA Earth observation datasets, and advancing methods to enhance LCLUC science.

Since the 2010s, the LCLUC program has emphasized monitoring hotspot LCLUC areas, synthesis and decision support, and funding projects that not only detect land change but also analyze feedbacks between human activities and environmental and social systems. The program has supported the development of LCLUC datasets, modeling frameworks, and tools for policy and management, while promoting training and capacity building to ensure effective use of NASA Earth Observation data. Today, NASA LCLUC has a broad international network of researchers, fostering collaborations that combine Earth observations, geospatial analysis, and modeling to better understand the complex interactions between human society and the land surface. It remains a cornerstone of NASA’s efforts to link space-based observations with real-world environmental challenges.

Currently, LCLUC remains a core NASA initiative under the Biosphere theme, linking Earth observations to global sustainability and natural resource management, and continuing its mission to understand how humans are reshaping the Earth’s surface.

This Special Issue invites articles from researchers and collaborators previously or currently collaborating with the NASA LCLUC Program to reflect on past achievements and evaluate ongoing work in LCLUC research. Submissions may include review and synthesis articles, technical case studies, or original research, and may cover, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Retrospective analyses of NASA LCLUC-funded research and its contributions to understanding land-cover and land-use dynamics.
• Long-term monitoring and synthesis of land-cover/land-use datasets, including historical reconstructions of land-change patterns.
• Drivers of land-use change, including socioeconomic, policy, and environmental factors.
• Impacts of land-cover and land-use change on carbon and water cycles, climate, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human well-being.
• Urbanization, deforestation, agricultural expansion or abandonment, and land degradation studies, including lessons learned and modeling of future land-use scenarios.
• Integration of satellite data with modeling and socioeconomic datasets for holistic land-change assessment.
• Decision-support tools and applications for sustainable land management and natural resource planning.
• US interagency and international networks, space agency, or other collaboration initiatives, highlighting lessons learned and emerging opportunities.
• Prospective and innovative methodologies, including AI/ML approaches, digital twins, predictive modeling, and novel remote sensing techniques for addressing future land-change challenges.

Dr. Krishna Vadrevu
Dr. Garik Gutman
Prof. Dr. Chris Justice
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Remote Sensing is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• land-cover/land-use change
• long-term monitoring
• multi-satellite remote sensing
• time series
• historical reconstruction
• land-change drivers
• urbanization
• deforestation
• agricultural expansion
• agricultural abandonment
• land degradation
• ecosystem services
• modeling
• digital twins
• AI/machine learning
• decision support
• sustainable land management
• natural resource planning