Xavier Rotllan-Puig, Eva Ivits, Michael Cherlet

As part of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 15 (Life on Land), the indicator 15.3.1 is adopted to measure the Land Degradation Neutrality. Land Degradation Neutrality is addressed as stable —or increasing— state in the amount and quality of land resources required to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security during a certain period of time. It is a binary indicator (i.e. degraded/not degraded), expressed as the proportion of land that is degraded over total land area within each land type, and is based on three sub-indicators: (1) Trends in Land Cover, (2) Land Productivity and (3) Carbon Stocks.
The Land Productivity sub-indicator (LP) refers to the total above-ground Net Primary Production and reflects changes in health and productive capacity of the land. Declining trends interpreted with ancillary data such as e.g. information on non-adapted agricultural practices possibly combined with low income can be usually understood as land degradation. LP can be calculated using the Land Productivity Dynamics (LPD) approach, which is the methodological basis of the R-based tool LPDynR presented in this article. It uses vegetation-related indices (phenology and productivity) derived from time series of remote sensed vegetation indices to estimate ecosystem dynamics and change. The final result of the LPD indicator is a categorical map with 5 classes of land productivity dynamics, ranging from declining to increasing productivity. As an example of LPDynR functionalities, we present a case study for Europe.