Mapping and monitoring of land use changes in post-Soviet western Ukraine using remote sensing data

While agriculture is expanded and intensified in many parts of the world, decreases in land use intensity and farmland abandonment take place in other parts. Eastern Europe experienced widespread changes of agricultural land use after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, rates and patterns of these changes are still not well understood. Our objective was to map and analyze changes of land management regimes, including large-scale cropland, small-scale cropland, and abandoned farmland. Monitoring land management regimes is a promising avenue to better understand the temporal and spatial patterns of land use intensity changes. For mapping and change detection, we used an object-based approach with Superpixel segmentation for delineating objects and a Random Forest classifier. We applied this approach to Landsat and ERS SAR data for the years 1986, 1993, 1999, 2006, and 2010 to estimate change trajectories for this time period in western Ukraine. The first period during the 1990s was characterized by post-socialist transition processes including farmland abandonment and substantial subsistence agriculture. Later on, recultivation processes and the recurrence of industrial, large-scale farming were triggered by global food prices that have led to a growing interest in this region.