Ecosystem Integrity Index (EII)

Overview

The Ecosystem Integrity Index (EII) is a holistic metric designed to quantify the health of terrestrial ecosystems globally. Unlike simpler metrics that rely on a single proxy, EII synthesizes three fundamental dimensions of ecosystem integrity: Function, Structure, and Composition.

This implementation builds and expands on the conceptual framework developed by the UNEP-WCMC: Hill et al. (2022) The Ecosystem Integrity Index: a novel measure of terrestrial ecosystem integrity.

Quick Start

import ee
from eii.client import get_stats

# Initialize Earth Engine
ee.Authenticate()
ee.Initialize(project='your-project')

# Define area of interest
polygon = ee.Geometry.Rectangle([-60, -10, -55, -5])

# Get EII data
eii_data = get_stats(polygon)
print(eii_data)

Installation

For development:

git clone https://github.com/landler-io/ecosystem-integrity-index.git
cd ecosystem-integrity-index
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Documentation

Full documentation is available here

• Getting Started
• Methodology
• Limitations & Roadmap
• API Reference

Repository Structure

ecosystem-integrity-index/
├── src/eii/              # Python package for data access and compute
├── pipelines/            # Data preprocessing, modeling, and exports
├── notebooks/            # Placeholder for example notebooks
├── docs/                 # Documentation
└── analysis/             # GEE web application (future)

Citation

If you use EII in your research, please cite:

Leutner, B. (2025) "The Ecosystem Integrity Index: A comprehensive, globally applicable, and unified metric for ecosystem health". Technical Whitepaper. The Landbanking Group, Munich, Germany. PDF

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 - see LICENSE for details.