Land cover changes in Euboea island using Sentinel-2 datasets

Abstract

The Euboea Island is the second largest island in Greece and has a notable agricultural sector while it is a traditional touristic destination but lately has suffered from extreme wildfires and floods. The scope of the study is to monitor the latest land cover changes in Euboea island after the abrupt environmental disasters caused extended damages in private properties, agricultural sector and infrastructures. The analytic recording of land cover changes was made by analyzing a series of Sentinel-2 satellite multispectral imagery. Moreover, the latest CORINE data product (2018) was used for the selection of the training samples which is crucial for the classification process. The overall accuracy of the classifiers exceeds 85% providing reliable results about the classification procedure. After all analyses, it was concluded that environmental situation in the study domain, the most notable change is the large decrease in forests, especially in the northern part of the island. The agricultural sector has seasonal changes but in general, a small decrease is also depicted. The urban/semiurban class is practically unchanged which indicates - among others - that there is not a significant touristic growth as well as new employment perspectives.