Remote sensing of land change: A multifaceted perspective

The discipline of land change science has been evolving rapidly in the past decades. Remote sensing played a major role in one of the essential components of land change science, which includes observation, monitoring, and characterization of land change. In this paper, we proposed a new framework of the multifaceted view of land change through the lens of remote sensing and recommended five facets of land change including change location, time, target, metric, and agent. We also evaluated the impacts of spatial, spectral, temporal, angular, and data-integration domains of the remotely sensed data on observing, monitoring, and characterization of different facets of land change, as well as discussed some of the current land change products. We recommend clarifying the specific land change facet being studied in remote sensing of land change, reporting multiple or all facets of land change in remote sensing products, shifting the focus from land cover change to specific change metric and agent, integrating social science data and multi-sensor datasets for a deeper and fuller understanding of land change, and recognizing limitations and weaknesses of remote sensing in land change studies.