Global Pasture Watch

Pastures and rangelands are the single most extensive land use on Earth and we need to understand the productivity of these areas and how they are changing over time to meet global climate goals. Yet these areas rarely have dedicated monitoring efforts and there is currently no good understanding of their location, area, and condition.

A new Land & Carbon Lab research consortium, Global Pasture Watch, aims to produce recurrent and high-resolution (30-meter) maps for pasture areas and productivity from 2000 onwards. The project uses ensemble machine learning algorithms, visual interpretations, crowdsourcing, and earth observation data fusion to produce per-pixel probabilities of land use and land cover, livestock density, short vegetation height, and gross primary productivity (GPP).

The consortium’s purpose will be to develop four deliverables in order to have a better understanding of grasslands:

1. Pasture – class maps: An annual time-series map with spatial resolution of 30 meters.
2. Livestock density map aimed to identify hotspots of managed or unmanaged areas of pasture with the number of animals per hectare.
3. Short vegetation height maps: An annual time-series map to identify areas where there will be pastures and specific vegetation, such as shrubs.
4. Gross primary productivity maps: A bi-monthly map aim to identify the number of kilograms of carbon produced per m2 of used.