Monitoring farmland abandonment by multitemporal and multisensor remote sensing imagery

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This research project studies an area in the border region of Poland and Ukraine. With the fall of the Iron Curtain the region experienced drastic changes in political and socio- economic structures. Large farmland areas become abandoned and gradual processes of forest succession take place on the abandoned land. Reliable statistics are not available, however, remote sensing systems have the potential to provide spatially distributed and temporally frequent data on land cover and its environmental state. Thus, remote sensing based mapping offers great opportunities to map these phenomena and ultimately to better understand patterns, processes and underlying causes. Existing studies are based on multispectral imagery, abandonment maps, however, are difficult to obtain due to spectral ambiguities, phenological variability and limited data availability. SAR data can overcome these problems and different remote sensing studies demonstrated the potential of multisensor imagery. The aim of the project is the development of adequate strategies to monitor farmland abandonment, using multitemporal SAR and multispectral remote sensing data. Finally enhanced maps should be provided, which enable more detailed analysis of the gradual process of land cover transitions.