Digital transdisciplinarity in land change science – integrating multiple types of digital data

Human activities alter the land surface of the Earth (Haberl et al., 2007; Hurtt et al., 2006), and one key questionwithin geography is, therefore, the assessment of land use/land cover change (LULCC) and the analysis and understanding of the underlying drivers and effects of LULCC (Brandt, Primdahl, & Reenberg, 1999; Bürgi, Hersperger, & Schneeberger, 2004; Plieninger et al., 2016). The last decades have seen amassive andwidespread digitalization of spatial and non-spatial information, which can be linked (and hence geo-referred) to specific spatial units or entities (Fuchs, Verburg, Clevers, & Herold, 2015; Goldberg, Olivares, Li, & Klein, 2014). Digitalization came relatively early to the field of land change science, mainly due to the use of geographic information systems to handle spatial data in the form of maps and remotely sensed data (Haines-Young, Green, & Cousins, 1993). It can, therefore, be argued that a long digital tradition exists within land change science, which has been open to pursue the possibilities of new data sources and methods as these have emerged. Recent years have seen an unprecedented growth in the amount of digital data as well as rapid advances in new digital methods, tools and research infrastructures across academia (Kong, 2015). This includes easy access to spatially specific information from other domains and academic fields, such as register data from government agencies, data from aerial and terrestrial sensors, and a wide range of historical data repositories. Furthermore, as many data sets are available for whole regions, countries or even at global scale, analyses of land change with large geographical coverage and at the same time at high spatial resolutions are increasingly made possible. It can be argued that a new era of digital data has opened up for transdisciplinary interactions for land change research. Yet, increased access to digital data also entails challenges related to the validity of data and the need for new approaches to integrate multiple digital data sources. All five articles in this special issue concern the application of digital data in land change research. In the following sections, we present the articles and discuss them in the wider context of: (1) the sound understanding, interpretation and thus application of digital data and (2) the development ofmethodologies to integratemultiple digital data in a transdisciplinary manner.