Metric · Glossary
EcoDynamic Index
Also: EDX
Definition
The Ecological Health Index carried through time. EcoIntel computes the four-process EHI across the growing season for every year from 2018, rather than once on a visit, so what exists for a field is a series and not a reading. The series is banded 1 to 9, from 1 Collapsed to 9 Flourishing, and that banded number is the Land Health Score in numeric form.
The EcoDynamic Index (EDX) is the Ecological Health Index (EHI) carried through time. The published field method scores the EHI once a year, on one visit, by a trained assessor. EcoIntel computes the same four-process instrument across the growing season, every year from 2018, from the run of satellite passes over a field. What exists for that field is therefore a series rather than a reading, and that is what the name marks.
Everything the platform does that a single visit cannot do follows from it: a trajectory rather than a level, a recovery rate rather than a state, a comparison between this season and the seven before it. The four ecosystem-process indices sit underneath on the same basis, so a field reading Transitional can be opened up to show which flow is holding it back. That is the difference between a grade and a diagnosis.
The series is then reduced to one number a person can use. We take the point in the year at which the field reached its best, normalise it onto a 0-to-100 scale, and band it into nine levels ascending from 1 Collapsed to 9 Flourishing. That banded number is the Land Health Score in numeric form. It works like a Beaufort scale for land: a readable label for a complicated reality, where everyone can agree what a force-nine gale looks like without reading the wind-speed table underneath. The banding is a convenience on top of the series rather than the point of it.