IndiGeo: an open-source Geospatial platform for multi-indicator SDG 15 environmental monitoring in Ecuador

Environmental monitoring for Sustainable Development Goal 15 (Life on Land) in resource-constrained institutions faces critical challenges: fragmented workflows, dependency on proprietary software, and limited reproducibility across institutions. Ecuador, despite being one of the world’s 17 megadiverse countries, lacks integrated tools, to operationalize the indicators developed by the NASA Life on Land project, which is a regional collaboration with Colombia and Peru for SDG 15 reporting. This paper presents IndiGeo, an integrated open-source geospatial platform that addresses these gaps by implementing two of the three NASA Life on Land indicators adopted by Ecuador: Human Footprint (HF) and Riparian Forest Cover (RFC). Unlike existing solutions such as Google Earth Engine that require cloud dependencies and advanced GIS expertise, IndiGeo provides reproducible ETL workflows in Python and R, interactive Shiny dashboards, and a React interface—all containerized via Docker for deployment on local or cloud infrastructure. Applied to continental Ecuador, IndiGeo processed HF data (90 m resolution, 2014–2022) and RFC data (30 m resolution, 1990–2020), revealing concerning trends: the "Very Low" HF category decreased from 60.17% to 57.43% of national territory, while RFC declined from 74.06% (2000) to 41.80% (2020). These results evidence IndiGeo’s capability to process multiple environmental indicators. Developed in collaboration with Ecuador’s Ministry of Environment (MAATE), IndiGeo implements official national methodologies, providing a replicable model for reproducible SDG 15 monitoring, aligned with official MAATE methodologies, in similar institutional contexts.