The overall goal of this project is to produce recurrent and high-resolution mapping products (i.e. 30-m spatial resolution) for pasture areas and livestock from 2000 onwards, aiming to support the objectives and impacts of the Land & Carbon Lab. The products generated by the project will have potential to contribute for a better understanding of land use conversion, food production, biodiversity, climate change and land productivity at global scale.
In response to the need for global grassland monitoring products and the lack of suitable initiatives targeting grasslands, the Land & Carbon Lab initiated the Global Pasture Watch (GPW) consortium, comprising experts from the World Resources Institute (WRI), OpenGeoHub, the Image Processing and GIS Laboratory at the Federal University of Goiás (LAPIG / UFG), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Cornell, and the Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory of the University of Maryland (GLAD). The Global Pasture Watch aims to advance grassland monitoring by creating recurrent collections of global mapping products from the year 2000 onward at a suitable resolution (i.e. 30 m spatial resolution) to create fit-for-purpose monitoring solutions.
© Global Pasture Watch
The main objectives of this project are:
Produce globally consistent spacetime data products focused on pasture / grasslands dynamics that are compatible and can be combined with other Land & Carbon Lab data outputs;
Provide support to other teams within the Land & Carbon Lab project and externally, and revise products based on the feedback from use cases;
Provide an internationally applicable methodological framework (open-data-based, transparent, reproducible) for monitoring global pasture / grasslands and livestock beyond the end of the project;
Establish a global user and expert community focused on improving protection management of pasture / grasslands (increasing GPP through time, decreasing soil degradation);
The Novel Data Ecosystems for Sustainability (NODES) research group has a role in the validation, support and quality control of the Global Pasture Watch maps, as well as in the contribution to improved time series of the global livestock distribution.