Supporting future earth with global geospatial information

Future Earth, initiated by the International Council of Science Unions and presented during the Planet under Pressure conference held on 26–29 March 2012, is a global research initiative aiming at developing the knowledge for effective response to the risks and opportunities of global environmental change and for supporting transformation towards a sustainable world. It calls for the delivery of solution-oriented research, effective inter-disciplinary collaboration and timely information in line with opportunities of global environmental change and for supporting transformation towards global sustainability in the coming decades (Future Earth 2014; van der Hel 2106). Dynamic Planet, Global Development and Transformations towards sustainability are its three research themes, which depend critically on the availability and utilization of reliable information, including multi-scale geospatial data sets, at both local and global scales (Reid et al. 2010).

With the advancement of remote sensing and spatial information technologies, more and more geospatial data sets at both global and local scales will increasingly become available in addition to those that have already been produced in the past (Chen et al. 2016). Supporting Future Earth with reliable global geospatial information is becoming a key challenge for assuring successful global understanding, environmental change analysis, transformational development and dynamic modelling (Guo 2016), and therefore ensuring the successful implementation of the Future Earth.

This special issue of the International Journal of Digital Earth (IJDE) is devoted to the latest development on global geospatial data production and sharing, successful application experiences of global geospatial information in environmental change analysis and sustainability studies, examination and analysis of up-to-date user requirements and key gaps arising from Future Earth studies, and identification of major challenges. It includes two invited papers and six submitted papers, all peer-reviewed, addressing different aspects of supporting Future Earth with global geospatial information. The papers by Doman and Reuter and Zeng et al. focus on the availability of global geospatial information by looking into available earth observation and digital elevation model data sets, data sharing and CO₂ data generation. The other four papers by Chen et al., Brovelli et al., Wen et al. and Wang et al. present solution-oriented studies, particular computing tools and platforms that can support the implementation of the Future Earth concepts. Finally, the two papers by Mario Hernandez and Desha et al. discuss digital earth development issues in the context of the Future Earth.

Ian Dowman and Hannes I. Reuter in their invited paper, entitled ‘Global geospatial data from Earth observation: status and issues’, presents a high-level review to assess the progress at the global level in developing geospatial data sets including digital elevation model data. This high-level review provides readers opportunities to understand some key issues related to standardization, accuracy and validation, data availability and presentation with respect to providing reliable global geospatial information using earth observation methods to support Future Earth developments.

Mario Hernandez’s invited paper focuses on how digital earth platform can support sustainable development goals towards sustainability, which is the core of Future Earth initiative. The paper discusses aspects of developing a supportive digital earth platform and some foreseeable challenges, particularly data and geo-visualization aspects related to digital earth platform for adding value to data and sharing data with other disciplines. Recommendations on the way the International Society of Digital Earth (ISDE) should move forward are given. The paper recaps the importance of a digital earth platform as a key element for the national and international communities to be able to access the vast amount of data, which is critically important to the full realization of Future Earth.

Jun Chen, Songnian Li, Hao Wu and Xianjun Chen’s paper on ‘Towards a collaborative global land cover information service’, presents a conceptual framework for developing a Collaborative Global Land Cover Information Service (CoGland). CoGland promotes the development of global land cover information services that are needed to support many Future Earth studies. The paper further discusses how the framework may be implemented under the framework of the Group on Earth Observations with the support of and/or coordination role played by a number of key organizations such as GEO, UN-GGIM, ISPRS and ISDE.

The paper, entitled ‘Pivotal principles for digital earth development in the twenty-first century’ by Cheryl Desha, Timothy Foresman, Annapurna Vancheswaran, Angela Reeve and John Hayes, presents the findings found from a series dialogues hosted by the International Society for Digital Earth, which address spatial information, sustainable development, and good governance through three guiding principles: open data, real-world context, and informed visualization for decision support. As indicated in the paper, these principles form ‘a framework for establishing a context for action – within nations and internationally – opening up solution spaces for transformational and sustainable change in governance and decision-making in a complex and dynamic world’. Readers would appreciate the detailed discussions on how these principles are defined and may be engaged in economic, environmental and societal developments at different scales.

Maria A. Brovelli, Marco Minghini, Rafael Moreno-Sanchez and Ricardo Oliveira studies Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Applications (FOSS4G) as a promising solution to support the development of both Digital Earth and Future Earth. The paper argues that FOSS4G ‘can play an important role in data collection, creation of components, integration of information systems, stakeholders’ engagement, and dissemination of information’, which is essential for the realization of the Future Earth vision. In addition to a comprehensive review of FOSS4G solutions, software selection criteria and challenges in adopting them, an interesting and important contribution is the inclusion of many applications to showcase the power of FOSS4G in helping achieve the Future Earth vision and goals.

To address the increasing need for the ability to integrate multi-disciplinary knowledge and to process complex geospatial information for supporting Future Earth, Yongning Wen, Min Chen, Songshan Yue, Peibei Zheng, Guoqiang Peng and Guonian Lu proposes a strategy for collaboratively sharing of geospatial analysis models in a web-based environment, which is in line with the Model Web initiative proposed by the Group on Earth Observation (Nativi, Mazzetti, and Geller 2013). The paper presents technical details on how models can be deployed as services – the basic building blocks for dynamic service computing to support real-time environmental change analysis, for example.

In the sixth paper, Zeng et al. presents their study on ‘global land mapping of satellite-observed CO₂ total columns using spatio-temporal geo-statistics’. The focus is on the generation of a new global land mapping data set of CO₂ total column, which is useful in global understanding of greenhouse gases dynamics and global warming. An approach based on spatio-temporal geo-statistics for global land mapping of satellite XCO2 observations from ACOS-GOSAT, together with other data, is presented.

In the paper by Mingshu Wang, Marguerite Madden, Ian Hendy, Estradivari and Gabby N. Ahmadia, spatial analysis with model-based climatic indicators and simple mangrove distribution maps are used to model how mangroves will respond to climate change, which shows an important application of geospatial information in biodiversity studies. Since only temperature and precipitation are considered in deriving the climatic model, the authors suggest a coupled earth system modelling to holistically accommodate other un-tackled factors such as sea-level rise in future studies.

We sincerely thank the authors who contributed their papers to this Special Issue. We also extend our appreciation to the following reviewers: Ali Mahdavi Amiri, Yuqi Bai, Maria Antonia Brovelli, Jun Chen, Edwin Chow, Projo Danoedoro, Phillip Davis, Luciene Stamato Delazari, Ian Dowman, Robert R. Downs, Geoffrey Dutton, Timothy Foresman, Peng Gong, Dorit Hammerling, Weiguo Han, Huicong Jia, Fei Jiang, Peter Johnson, Claudia Kuenzer, Helena Mitasova, Abbas Rajabifard, Sven Schade, Coetzee Serena, George Sithole, Alfred Stein, Emmanuel Stefanakis, Nathalie Stephenne, Ming-Hsiang Tson, Eric Vaz, Bert Veenendaal, Xin Wang, Chandi Witharana, Wanglin Yan, Hui Yang, Chunhua Zhang, Qing Zhu and Sisi Zlatanova for their valuable and constructive comments during the peer-review process. The publication of this Special Issue would not have been possible without the support of the Editor-in-Chief Prof. Huadong Guo, the continuous support and advise of the Executive Editor Dr Changlin Wang, and the assistance and effort of the Assistant Editor Ms Linlin Guan in assembling all the materials.