Scholarly record

MONITORING AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF LAND USE CHANGES ON THE EXAMPLE FOREST REGION OF FINLAND

Iuliia A. Polevshchikova

Abstract

Understanding human impact on land-cover and capacity to monitor change is fundamental to sound research and informed decision-making to address Global Change and ensure sustainable development. While remote sensing technology is evolving rapidly, and multiple land-cover products have been developed, the lack of detailed information on land-cover remains a major problem. Analysis of vegetation in the study includes the assessment of different tree species and provides a broad-scale evaluation of available land-cover products, along with synthesis and documentation of results by research groups actively involved in decisions in the region. Remote sensing and GIS techniques are widely used for land cover monitoring under climate change and human impact but the lack of reliable information on land use changes remains a major challenge of today. The purpose of this paper is comparative analysis of land cover using GIS and remote sensing data. The research covers the changes in land use caused by different types of natural disturbance (forest fires, reforestation on abandoned lands, etc.) and social-economic factors (reform in forestry and agriculture). This paper argues the land cover monitoring technique using satellite information and conducting assessments of land use change with the ground data. Connection between land use change and socio-economic factors considered as a main case of determination the roles of policies in land use, agriculture and forestry.

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