Satellite Data Reveal Cropland Losses in South-Eastern Ukraine Under Military Conflict

Sergii Skakun,Mykola Lavreniuk,Christopher O Justice,Andrii Shelestov,Nataliia Kussul

doi:10.3389/feart.2019.00305

Abstract

While people are aware that there is a continuing conflict in Ukraine, there is little understanding of its impact. The military conflict in South-Eastern Ukraine has been on-going since 2014, with a major socio-economic impact on the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. In this study, we quantify land cover land use changes in those regions related to cropland changes. Cropland areas account for almost 50% of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and with the declining industry between 2014–2017, the role of agriculture to the regional economy has increased. We use freely available satellite data and machine learning methods to map cropland extent in 2013 and 2018 and derive corresponding changes in cropland areas. We use a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to classify multi-temporal Landsat-7, Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 images into cropland and non-cropland areas, and a sampling-based approach to estimate the areas of cropland change. We found that net cropland losses were not uniform across the regions, and were more substantial in the areas not under control of the Ukrainian Government (22% of net cropland area loss compared to cropland areas in 2013) and within a buffer zone along the conflict border line (46%), where combat activities occur. These results highlight the impact of the conflict on agriculture and the utility of spatially explicit information acquired from Earth observation satellites, especially for areas, where collecting ground-based data is impractical.

Highlights

In 2013–2014, Ukraine experienced a dramatic political and social change, caused by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and partial occupation of areas in Donetsk and Luhansk regions by pro-Russian militants (Ivanov, 2015; Davis, 2016)
Parts of cropland losses were actual conversions from cropland to fallow, which were incorrectly mapped for the same reasons stated above
The military conflict in Southeast Ukraine has been continuing since 2014, and the present study highlighted regional LCLU changes associated with this conflict

Summary

Introduction

In 2013–2014, Ukraine experienced a dramatic political and social change, caused by the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and partial occupation of areas in Donetsk and Luhansk regions by pro-Russian militants (Ivanov, 2015; Davis, 2016). Only half of the area of these regions is cropland, agriculture contributed 4.1% (Donetsk) and 5.9% (Luhansk) to the overall regional gross value added (GVA) in 2009–2013 (Figure 1). With the increased role of agriculture in the regional economy, it is important to understand how the ongoing conflict is impacting agricultural land use and the geographical patterns of these changes. The collapse of the former Soviet Union led to land use change in the Ukraine in the form of cropland abandonment (Gutman and Radeloff, 2016; Lesiv et al, 2018). Since 2007, these abandoned agricultural lands started to be re-cultivated, resulting in up to 1 million ha of re-cultivation (Smaliychuk et al, 2016)

Methods

Results

Conclusion