Abstract

The discipline of land change science has been evolving rapidly in the past decades. Remote sensing played a major role in one of the most critical 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, process, and agent. We also evaluated the impact of spatial, spectral, temporal, and angular dimensions 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 all remote sensing of land change efforts, reporting multiple or full facets of land change in remote sensing products, shifting the focus from land cover change to identify the specific change process and agent, integrating socioeconomic data as well as new social-environment framework for a deeper and fuller understanding of land change, and recognizing the limitations and weaknesses of remote sensing platforms in land change studies.