Articulating environmental sustainability dynamics with space-time cube

Conceptually, environmental sustainability involves maintaining crucial environmental functions while considering both present and future development. However, existing methods for expressing environmental sustainability are mainly derived from a steady state with minimal spatial explicitness. Furthermore, the environmental impact of certain events may exhibit a lag, particularly in basins. Here, we propose a framework that employs a space-time cube to articulate environmental sustainability. This cube can visualize the environment's evolution over time, identify hot and cold spots in space, and concurrently determine underlying influencing factors via spatial regression analysis. Unlike traditional methods, the space-time cube incorporates not only spatial dimensions but also temporal dimensions. We applied this framework to China's upper Han River basin, using the Remote Sensing Ecological Index (RSEI) as an indicator of environmental sustainability. It enabled us to chart the basin's ecological trajectory with spatial and temporal explicitness from 1990 to 2020. Our findings reveal that climate change (represented by temperature and precipitation changes) and human activities (represented by nighttime light) were the main factors driving changes in environmental sustainability from 2000 to 2020 in the basin. Therefore, our proposed spatial-temporal integration framework proves to be an efficient tool in articulating environmental sustainability. • The proposed framework characterizes continuous space-time sequences. • The framework can account for time-lag effects on environmental impacts. • We detected hot/cold spots of environmental sustainability and their driving forces.