Land Change Pulse methodology
How Lankawa turns land-cover research into a district morning check — without hosting satellite mosaics.
What the indices mean
Each district has a greenery index and a built-up index on a 0–100 scale for 2018 and 2024. Deltas are point changes over that window. Numbers are sized for civic pulse use (compare with AQI or flood status), not cadastral mapping.
What Team Watchdog does — and what we do instead
Team Watchdog’s satellite2024 project publishes annual Sentinel-2 mosaics and land-cover grids for journalism and research. That work is excellent prior art under MIT licence. Lankawa’s job is different: a daily, trilingual product with freshness provenance.
- We do not host multi‑GB mosaics or Drive folders inside the app.
- We ship small district JSON, an API, CSV export, and district-page cards.
- We credit Watchdog as research inspiration; our indices are Lankawa’s civic aggregation until a year‑2 ETL writes observations from LULC grids.
Honesty contract
This series is curated / seed until Lankawa runs its own yearly land-cover ETL. It is not Survey Department land use, not zoning, and not a live sensor feed. Treat it like other Lankawa seed pulses: useful context with clear provenance.
Series as of 2026-07-18 · Lankawa Land Change Pulse
API & export
Machine-readable access uses the same shape as other Lankawa civic endpoints.
GET /api/v1/environment/land-change