Toward a global monitoring framework of soil and rangeland health: Building on 20 years of the LDSF

Abstract Rangelands are among the most extensive land use systems globally, supporting the livelihoods of billions of people, sustaining pastoral economies, conserving biodiversity and providing critical ecosystem services. Despite their importance, they remain among the least consistently monitored ecosystems. This lack of standardized, high-quality data constrains the ability to assess degradation, evaluate restoration efforts and report progress toward national and global targets. We conducted a review of existing rangeland monitoring frameworks, standards, and remote sensing platforms to understand the methodologies used and indicators measured. Results highlight significant fragmentation and inconsistency in current approaches, underscoring the urgent need for standardized monitoring systems that can capture the complexity and variability of rangeland ecosystems. The Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) was developed in response to the need for systematic assessments of soil health, land degradation and vegetation diversity within and across landscapes, including in rangelands. In this article, we present the LDSF as a well-established, scalable approach for monitoring soil and land health, underpinning a globally harmonized rangeland monitoring system. Over the last two decades, the LDSF has been implemented in over 40 countries in the tropics and subtropics and has become an important database of georeferenced indicators of ecosystem health. In this article, we: (i) report findings from a systematic review of existing rangeland monitoring frameworks, standards, and remote sensing platforms; (ii) synthesize the LDSF’s geospatially stratified, hierarchical sampling design and core indicator framework; and (iii) demonstrate how LDSF field data and Earth Observation are combined to generate spatially explicit, statistically robust maps of soil and land health, including in African rangelands.