EcoDynamic Index

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.