LivingEarth

To describe change, Living Earth has developed a globally applicable Evidence Based Change Framework and Global Change Taxonomy, which was designed for global application and builds on the Driver-Pressure-State-Impacts-Response (DPSIR) framework. The taxonomy lists 77 impact and 144 pressure classes that, when combined, give 248 ‘impact (pressure)’ classes, each of which can be evidenced by accumulating and comparing changes in states (i.e., the Environmental Descriptors used to construct and further attribute the land cover categories). The Evidence-Based Change Framework provides a basis for collating the evidence for both change impacts and pressures, with these obtained spatially and over time from Earth observation data but also a range of other spatial and, in some cases, non-spatial datasets. Time is included as a contributory descriptor relevant for differentiating short-term natural events or human activities (e.g., vegetation amount loss as a consequence of bushfires or deforestation) or longer-term natural process (e.g., vegetation gain through growth). Furthermore, the contributory evidence can be supported by estimates in the uncertainty of retrieval or classification of continuous or categorical environmental descriptors respectively.