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

Abstract After 1991, major events, such as the collapse of socialism and the transition to market economies, caused land use change across the former USSR and affected forests in particular. However, major land use changes may have occurred already during Soviet rule, but those are largely unknown and difficult to map for large areas because 30-m Landsat data is not available prior to the 1980s. Our goal was to analyze the rates and determinants of forest cover change from 1967 to 2015 along the Latvian-Russian border, and to develop an object-based image analysis approach to compare forest cover based on declassified Corona spy satellite images from 1967 with that derived from Landsat 5 TM…