Global Future Development Threat Map at 50 km² Resolution

NASA ESDIS's Development Threat Index is a global terrestrial map quantifying future development potential across nine resource sectors. It provides threat scores from 0 to 100 at a 50 square kilometer grid cell resolution, excluding Antarctica and predominantly marine cells. The dataset was published by the organization in December 2015.

Use Cases

• Modeling cumulative environmental impact by aggregating threat scores for agricultural expansion, urban expansion, and mining across grid cells.
• Identifying high-potential energy development zones by comparing scores for conventional oil and gas, unconventional oil and gas, coal, solar, and wind resources.
• Assessing regional biofuel expansion pressure using the specific biofuels threat layer within the 50 km² grid.
• Prioritizing conservation areas by flagging grid cells with high composite threat scores across multiple resource sectors.

Strengths

• Global terrestrial coverage at a consistent 50 square kilometer grid cell resolution.
• Combines threat indices for nine distinct development sectors into a single composite resource.
• Provides standardized threat scores on a 0-100 scale for comparative analysis.

Limitations

• Temporal staleness, with data last updated in 2015, missing recent development trends.
• Coarse 50 km² resolution may obscure local-scale variations in development threat.
• Excludes marine areas and Antarctica, limiting analysis to terrestrial domains.

Provenance

Source

NASA Earthdata (ESDIS)

Collection Method

Generated by combining and ranking projected development potential maps for nine resource sectors.

Time Range

Future projection (baseline year not specified).

Freshness

2015-12-31

Geography

Global terrestrial, excluding Antarctica and cells with >50% marine area.