Last updated | August 21, 2025

Indicator information

Name

Land productivity dynamics (LPD)

Unit

Area in km² with decreasing, stable or increasing trend in land productivity from 1999 to 2013. Land productivity is calculated from satellite observations of photosynthetically active vegetation as the above-ground biomass production accumulated during the annual growing season.

Area of interest

The LPD has been calculated and distributed through REST services at country, terrestrial ecoregion and protected area level and is available in KCBD - Global Biodiversity Data Viewer (GBDV) at country level.

Related targets

	Sustainable Development Goal 15 on life on land
	Global Biodiversity Framework Target 10

Policy question

Humans need increasing amounts of plant biomass for producing food, fodder, fibre and energy. Being able to meet these demands in the long term requires a sustainable use of land and vegetation resources. A persistent reduction in biomass production or land productivity will directly and indirectly impact almost all terrestrial ecosystem services and benefits that form the basis for sustainable livelihoods of all human communities. Tracking changes in land productivity is, therefore, an essential part of monitoring ecosystem changes and land transformations that are typically associated with land degradation. The state of the Earth’s vegetation cover and its development over time is one reliable and accepted measure associated with land productivity. 

Use and interpretation

LPD dataset, with a spatial resolution of 1 km, provides a spatial representation of the persistent trajectory of land productivity during 15 years (1999-2013), characterized by the following five qualitative classes indicating different directions and intensity of changes:

1. Persistent severe decline in productivity

2. Persistent moderate decline in productivity

3. Stable, but stressed; persistent strong inter-annual productivity variations

4. Stable productivity

5. Persistent increase in productivity

Desertic areas and water bodies, where no productivity is detected, are not classified.

LPD is a remotely-sensed global product based on vegetation phenological metrics that is related to the land’s capacity to sustain primary production. It is derived from time series of indices of vegetation photosynthetic activity, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), obtained from satellite data acquired by the SPOT VEGETATION sensor.

Persistent land productivity changes, as assessed by LPD, point to long-term alteration of the health and productive capacity of the land. The primary productivity of a stable land system is not a steady state, but often highly variable between different years and vegetation growth cycles due to natural variation and/or human intervention. This implies that land productivity changes cannot be assessed by comparing land productivity values of single reference years or averages of a few years. On the contrary, approaches must be based on longer term trends on multi-temporal change and trend analysis which are continuously repeated (persistent) in defined time steps using an extended time series, as is the case for LPD.

LPD trends detect areas with persistent and active declines in primary productivity that might point to ongoing land degradation, rather than areas which have already undergone degradation prior to the observation period and have reached a new equilibrium from which they do not further degrade within the observation period.

LPD refers to observed changes of above-ground biomass and is conceptually different from, and not necessarily related to, agricultural production or income per unit area.

Trends in land productivity have been adopted as one of three land-based progress indicators of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). These indicators are used for mandatory reporting and have been proposed as one sub-indicator for monitoring and assessing progress towards achieving target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) on a land degradation-neutral world.

Key caveats

Declining productivity as assessed through LPD refers to observed changes of above-ground biomass, and is certainly not the sole indicator of possible land degradation. Land degradation is a multifaceted global phenomenon with distinct variations between regions and across key land cover/land use systems which cannot be captured by a single or a limited set of indicators. Declining trends in LPD do not indicate land degradation per se, nor do increasing trends in LPD indicate recovery. For instance, increased productivity is sometimes achieved at the cost of other land resources, such as water or soil, in which case it can lead to degradation, which is observable only in later stages.

Research has shown that time series of remotely sensed vegetation indices, such as those used for deriving LPD, are correlated with biophysically meaningful vegetation characteristics such as photosynthetic capacity and primary production. These characteristics are closely related to global land surface changes and biomass trajectories that can be associated with processes of land degradation and recovery. However, it is necessary to incorporate other factors different from biomass trends into the analysis of land degradation. To identify critical land degradation zones, land productivity must be analysed within the context of anthropogenic land use and other environmental changes.

LPD is based on the NDVI, which is the most commonly used vegetation index and has demonstrated and strong relationships with primary productivity. There are however other vegetation indices that have been shown to perform better under some specific vegetation conditions such as sparse vegetation cover, although their derivation requires additional adjustment factors or model inputs that are not always available or that cannot be always measured reliably.

Land areas with no significant vegetation primary productivity, i.e., hyper-arid, arctic and very-high altitude mountain regions, as well as water bodies, are not included in the LPD classification.

LPD refers to observed changes of above-ground biomass and is conceptually different from, and not necessarily related to, agricultural production or income per unit area.

Because the area of the five LPD classes is computed within the boundaries for each terrestrial and coastal protected area and for its buffer, results will be affected by the accuracy of the available protected area boundaries.

Indicator status

LPD global results have been published in the World Atlas of Desertification (Cherlet et al., 2018).

The assessment of LPD in protected areas and in their buffers has been published in De la Fuente B et al., 2020. 

Available data and resources

Data

LPD values are available through REST services at country, terrestrial ecoregion and protected area level and are available in KCBD - Global Biodiversity Data Viewer (GBDV) at country level.

Update frequency

Planned annually.

Code

The procedure for the computation of the indicator, which currently involves the use of a wide range of software to handle the different steps, is documented in Juffe Bignoli et al. (2024).

Methodology

The LPD map contains information on persistent trajectories of land productivity dynamics during 15 years, from 1999 to 2013, which are summarised by five qualitative classes, plus a ‘No productivity’ class (see above). Provided with a resolution of 1 Km, the LPD data have been submitted to the standard procedure for categorical raster datasets described in details Juffe Bignoli et al. (2024) in order to derive the absolute (km²) and relative surface (%) covered by the different LPD qualitative classes for each reporting unit.

UNESCO Biosphere Reserves were discarded as well as protected areas with known areas but undefined boundaries. Only the part of the buffer around each protected area that does not overlap with other protected areas is considered; therefore, there might be cases of protected areas with no LPD information in their buffer area, when such buffer area fully overlaps with other surrounding protected areas.

Input datasets

References

Cherlet, M., Hutchinson, C., Reynolds, J., Hill, J., Sommer, S., von Maltitz, G. (Eds.). (2018). World Atlas of Desertification. Publication Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. http://wad.jrc.ec.europa.eu

De la Fuente B, Weynants M, Bertzky B, Delli G, Mandrici A, et al. (2020) Land productivity dynamics in and around protected areas globally from 1999 to 2013. PLOS ONE 15(8): e0224958. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224958

Dinerstein et al. (2017), An Ecoregion-Based Approach to Protecting Half the Terrestrial Realm, BioScience, Volume 67, Issue 6, June 2017, Pages 534–545, https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix014

Juffe-Bignoli et al. (2024) Delivering Systematic and Repeatable Area-Based Conservation Assessments: From Global to Local Scales. Land 2024, 13, 1506. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13091506

Lázaro, C., Mandrici, A., Delli, G., Caudullo, G., Bourgoin, C. et al., Challenges in integrating global environmental data with GISCO administrative layers – A GIS perspective, Publications Office of the European Union, 2025. https://dx.doi.org/10.2760/8183010

Sommer, S., Cherlet, M. & Ivits, E. (2017). Mapping land productivity dynamics: detecting critical trajectories of global land transformations. In: The Global Land Outlook (first edition), United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. Annex Two; pp 321 – 333. Bonn, Germany.

UNEP-WCMC & IUCN (2025). Protected Planet: The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) [On-line], [January/2025], Cambridge, UK: UNEP-WCMC and IUCN. www.protectedplanet.net