Landcover transitions

A country's land cover composition is a helpful starting point for understanding its environmental profile. But the composition itself is often only part of the story. More interesting is often how the land cover changed. In the case of deforestation, for example, we would be interested in the current land cover and how it has changed recently. Did the rate of deforestation decrease? Or did reforest programs successfully expand forest cover?

This tool goes one step further and answers the question: From which type and into which type of land cover did the country transition? Different from country-level aggregates on forest losses, transitions between land cover types also tell us more about the drivers and causes. If forests were cleared for agricultural purposes, we would expect to see transitions from the Tree cover type into Cropland or Grassland. If reforestation efforts were successful, we would expect the reverse.