OpenLand
OpenLand is an open-source R package for the analysis of land use and cover (LUC) time series. It includes support for consistency checks, loading spatiotemporal raster data, and synthesized spatial plotting. Several LUC change metrics in regular or irregular time intervals can be extracted and visualized through one- and multistep Sankey and chord diagrams.
A complete intensity analysis according to Aldwaik and Pontius (2012) is implemented, including tools for generating standardized multilevel output graphics.
Installation
Install the released version from CRAN:
install.packages("OpenLand")Or install the development version from GitHub:
# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("reginalexavier/OpenLand")What is Intensity Analysis?
Intensity Analysis (IA) is a quantitative method for analyzing LUC maps at several time steps using cross-tabulation matrices, where each matrix summarizes LUC change at each interval. IA evaluates three levels of deviation between observed change intensity and hypothesized uniform change intensity.
The interval level indicates how the size and rate of change vary over time. The category level examines how the size and intensity of gross losses and gains vary across categories. The transition level determines how the size and intensity of a category’s transitions vary across the other available categories. At each level, the method tests for stationarity of patterns across time intervals.
Outcomes of intensity analysis
Data are extracted from rasters with contingencyTable(), which returns grid information in tables for the next processing steps. intensityAnalysis() computes the three levels of analysis from that object and two user-selected LUC categories.