Land Cover in the Caucasus

DATASET
variable
timestep
LAYER OPACITY
LEGEND

Description

Mountainous regions are changing rapidly across the world due to both land-use change and climate change. Given the importance of mountainous regions for ecosystem services and endemic biodiversity, monitoring these changes is essential. Satellite data provide a great resource to map land-cover change in mountainous regions, however mapping is especially challenging there because topographic complexity affects reflectance. Here, we used Landsat data to perform a long-term land-cover change assessment for a large mountainous region, i.e., the Caucasus Mountains with topographic correction. Additionally, we used historical Corona spy satellite data to map land cover in the Caucasus in years 1964-65.

The land cover maps for 1987-2015 each consist of 10 land cover classes (1: coniferous forest, 2: mixed forest, 3: deciduous forest, 4: barren, 5: rangeland, 6: cropland, 7: built-up, 8: wetlands, 9: water, 10: snow and ice).

Landsat-based land-cover change maps exist for cropland (cropland = 1, non-cropland = 0, transitional cropland = 2) and forest (forest = 1, non-forest = 0, transitional forest = 2) for 6 time steps (1987, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015). All Caucasus land-cover and land-cover change maps are stored as GeoTIFF format at 30 meter spatial resolution. (Buchner et al., 2020)

The land cover map for 1965 consists of 11 land cover classes (1: forest, 4: barren, 5: grassland, 6: cropland, 7: urban, 8: wetland, 9: lake, 10: snow-and-ice, 11: river, 13: clouds, 15: cloud shadows). (Rizayeva et al., 2023)

The Corona-to-Landsat change maps depict changes between the following land cover classes: forest (1), barren (4), grassland (5), cropland (6), urban (7), wetland (8), and water (9). For example, a pixel value of 11 indicates that the land remained forested (1) in both the initial and the subsequent year. A pixel value of 16, represents forest loss to cropland, as the land was classified as forest (1) in the first year and cropland (6) in the second year. Similar interpretation apply to other pixel values. (Rizayeva et al., 2025)

 

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LAND COVER RASTERS
Corona-based:
1965
Landsat-based:
1987 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
LAND COVER CHANGE RASTERS
All Classes
Land Cover Change 1965-2015 Land Cover Change 1965-1987 Land Cover Change 1987-2015
Forest/Cropland only
Forest Change 1987-2015 Cropland Change 1987-2015