Half a century of forest cover change along the Latvian-Russian border captured by object-based image analysis of Corona and Landsat TM/OLI data

Mapping Mature Post-Agricultural Forests in the Polish Eastern Carpathians with Archival Remote Sensing Data

“…Nowadays, in many regions around the world, post-agricultural forests constitute a significant part of the total forest area [1,4,5]. There are many examples of mapping abandoned farmland [6,7] and forest cover changes [8,9], but limited research has focused on mapping post-agricultural forest in late succession stages. Post-agricultural forests develop in a different way than ancient forests and even several decades after agricultural land abandonment, they are still recovering [1,10,11].…”

“…The next step is feature extraction and classification, the quality of which depends on segmentation accuracy [28,29]. This procedure has already been successfully applied to classify black and white images [8,30]. In archaeological and historical-geographic research, archival aerial photographs are usually georeferenced using ground control points, which leads to significant location errors, especially in mountain areas (see [26]).…”

“…A post-war data source that meets these criteria is the U.S. spy satellite Corona, acquiring images since 1960 [34]. However, it is still rarely used in land cover research, mainly due to the demanding orthorectification process [32] and lack of clear classification methods for black and white images [8]. Moreover, the use of Corona images for scientific research was not possible before their declassification in 1995 [8,32,35].…”

“…However, it is still rarely used in land cover research, mainly due to the demanding orthorectification process [32] and lack of clear classification methods for black and white images [8]. Moreover, the use of Corona images for scientific research was not possible before their declassification in 1995 [8,32,35]. Only since then, Corona images have been used for mapping land cover changes in Senegal [35], forest cover changes in the Eastern United States, Central Brazil [36] and the Latvian-Russian border [8] and for the detection of forest cutting across Romania after WWII [32].…”

“…Moreover, the use of Corona images for scientific research was not possible before their declassification in 1995 [8,32,35]. Only since then, Corona images have been used for mapping land cover changes in Senegal [35], forest cover changes in the Eastern United States, Central Brazil [36] and the Latvian-Russian border [8] and for the detection of forest cutting across Romania after WWII [32]. However, there are no studies using Corona images for mapping post-agricultural forests.…”