# Quick introduction to the OpenLand package

This is a Vignette on how to use the OpenLand package for exploratory analysis of Land Use and Cover (LUC) time series.

## Description of the tool

OpenLand is an open-source R package for the analysis of land use and cover (LUC) time series. It includes support for consistency check and loading spatiotemporal raster data and synthesized spatial plotting. Several LUC change (LUCC) 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 the generation of standardized multilevel output graphics.

## São Lourenço river Basin example dataset

The OpenLand functionality is illustrated for a LUC dataset of São Lourenço river basin, a major Pantanal wetland contribution area as provided by the 4th edition of the Monitoring of Changes in Land cover and Land Use in the Upper Paraguay River Basin - Brazilian portion - Review Period: 2012 to 2014 (Embrapa Pantanal, Instituto SOS Pantanal, and WWF-Brasil 2015). The time series is composed by five LUC maps (2002, 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014). The study area of approximately 22,400 km2 is located in the Cerrado Savannah biom in the southeast of the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, which has experienced a LUCC of about 12% of its extension during the 12-years period, including deforestation and intensification of existing agricultural uses. For processing in the OpenLand package, the original multi-year shape file was transformed into rasters and then saved as a 5-layer `RasterStack` (`SaoLourencoBasin`), available from a public repository (10.5281/zenodo.3685229) as an `.RDA` file which can be loaded into `R`.

## The complete rendering of this document depends on the availability of the dataset in zenodo. Please try at another time.

Aldwaik, Safaa Zakaria, and Robert Gilmore Pontius. 2012. “Intensity analysis to unify measurements of size and stationarity of land changes by interval, category, and transition.” Landsc. Urban Plan. 106 (1): 103–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.02.010.
Embrapa Pantanal, Instituto SOS Pantanal, and WWF-Brasil. 2015. “Mapeamento da Bacia do Alto Paraguai.”