The EcoDynamics Diagnostic Engine: A Satellite- and GIS-based Method for Assessing and Diagnosing Ecosystem Condition

Nature-related disclosure now requires a measure of ecosystem condition that current methods do not deliver. The EcoDynamics Diagnostic Engine (EDDE) is a systems-based answer. From satellite and geographic-information-system (GIS) data, with no site visit and at low cost, it assesses the four primary ecosystem processes on any parcel/field as a weekly time series running back to 2018. That series is the EcoDynamic Index (EDX), and the engine reports each year's peak week as that year's Land Health Score, on a scale of 1 to 9. It extends the peer-reviewed, field-based Ecological Health Index (EHI) (Xu et al., 2019) from a single annual field score to that continuous series. In doing so it turns an analogue, static field method into a dynamic, digital diagnostic, built with artificial intelligence, and open about how that AI is used. Calibrated against 92 parcel-year observations across a diverse range of land states, the method recovers relative variation well, ordering a benchmark property's fields as trained in-field assessors do; the ordering replicates on a second, more diverse property of 44 fields (leave-one-out rank agreement r of about 0.77) once anchored to its own ground truth assessment. On the one property with a four-year record it calls the two-year direction of change correctly on eleven of 12 fields, catching every declining field, against a majority-class expectation of eight. It has been applied across three jurisdictions and four contrasting ecoregions, from oceanic British pasture to African savanna, where the assessment and diagnosis have held up and surfaced ground phenomena that had been hard to explain. Future calibration efforts will improve absolute, cross-site scale. From the same assessment the EDDE diagnoses the limiting ecosystem process for root-cause phenomena, prescribes actions based on these, organises measurements for nature-disclosure frameworks including TNFD and ESRS, and issues a portable, checkable nature-related credential; carbon and local cooling effects are reported as secondary outcomes. The coefficients and scoring engine are proprietary; the method is published here.