The discipline of land change science has been evolving rapidly in the
past decades. Remote sensing played a major role in one of the essential
components of land change science, which includes observation,
monitoring, and characterization of land change. In this paper, we
proposed a new framework of the multifaceted view of land change through
the lens of remote sensing and recommended five facets of land change
including change location, time, target, metric, and agent. We also
evaluated the impacts of spatial, spectral, temporal, angular, and
data-integration domains of the remotely sensed data on observing,
monitoring, and characterization of different facets of land change, as
well as discussed some of the current land change products. We recommend
clarifying the specific land change facet being studied in remote
sensing of land change, reporting multiple or all facets of land change
in remote sensing products, shifting the focus from land cover change to
specific change metric and agent, integrating social science data and
multi-sensor datasets for a deeper and fuller understanding of land
change, and recognizing limitations and weaknesses of remote sensing in
land change studies.