Global Land Suitability Indices for Energy and Agriculture Sectors

Thirteen sector-level Development Potential Indices (DPIs) provide a global, 1-km resolution assessment of land suitability for renewable energy, fossil fuel, mining, and agriculture development. The dataset was created by NASA's ESDIS organization and represents land conditions as of its last update in December 2016. Each DPI map integrates resource potential and development feasibility, validated against locations of current and planned projects.

Use Cases

• Identify high-suitability regions for concentrated solar power or wind farm expansion using the respective DPI layers.
• Compare land suitability for conventional oil and gas versus unconventional oil and gas development to inform extraction planning.
• Model potential land-use conflicts by overlaying the crop agriculture DPI with the biofuels expansion DPI.
• Assess global metallic and non-metallic mining potential by analyzing the corresponding mining sector DPIs.
• Plan hydropower development by evaluating the hydropower DPI for regions with favorable physical and economic conditions.

Strengths

• Thirteen distinct sector indices provide multi-domain coverage.
• Global coverage at a 1-kilometer spatial resolution.
• Indices are validated using locations of current and planned development projects.

Limitations

• Data is temporally stale, with a last update date of 2016-12 31.
• Unknown sample size (row count) and specific file formats.
• Potential bias towards regions with more documented development projects for validation.

Provenance

Source

NASA Earthdata (ESDIS).

Collection Method

Spatially-explicit global land suitability mapping integrating resource potential and development feasibility.

Time Range

Snapshot representing conditions circa 2016.

Freshness

2016-12-31

Geography

Global land coverage.