TOWARDS IMPROVED REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES FOR
AGRICULTURAL LAND COVER MONITORING IN RUSSIA
J.G.P.W. Clevers
Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen Agricultural University, The Netherlands
C.A. Mücher
DLO - Winand Staring Centre for Integrated Land, Soil and Water Research (SC-DLO), Wageningen, The Netherlands
N.M. Vandysheva, S.V. Filonov, G.A. Zhukova
Russian Institute for Land & Ecosystem Monitoring (RILEM), Moscow, Russia
Commission VII, Working Group 2
KEY WORDS: Remote, Sensing, Agriculture, Land Use, Monitoring, Russia
ABSTRACT
Due to agrarian reform and land privatisation in Russia, one of the most important tasks there is improving land cadaster and
land use planning systems. The difficult ecological situation and the increase of negative processes such as soil erosion,
salinity and pollution result in degradation of soil and vegetation, leading to serious problems in obtaining a sufficiently high
agricultural production. Development of regional strategies and programmes aimed at increasing the agricultural production
together with an efficient use of land resources require specific information such as land inventory, estimation of actual
conditions of agricultural lands and creation of updated land cover and land use maps. One of the most efficient ways in
creating a basis for solving these problems is developing an agricultural land monitoring system applying GIS and remote
sensing techniques that allows a fast update of land information for vast territories of Russia. In this study methods based on
using multi-sensor remote sensing data are applied to monitor agricultural land cover. A major objective is the identification
of land cover classes at different scale levels. An integrated method using a combination of multispectral scanner data and
photographic information of high resolution is developed.
1. INTRODUCTION
During recent years, drastic changes in land use systems
have taken place in Russia. Land reform and land
privatisation started, resulting in the arise of private
individual farms, the breaking up of some large collective
farms and formation of new, market-oriented systems. The
spliting up of large scale collective farming systems into
private farms not only resulted in changes in cropping
system but also in changes in field size. In many regions of
Russia the area of agricultural land was reduced. The
difficult ecological situation and the development of
undesirable processes such as soil erosion, salinity and
pollution result in degradation of soil and vegetation and
this leads to serious problems in obtaining a sufficiently
high agricultural production. As a result, one of the most
important and urgent problems in Russia now is to improve
land management and land use planning systems and to
develop regional strategies and programmes aimed at
increasing the agricultural production together with an
efficient use of land resources.
When considering the enormous extent of Russia (17
million sq.km, 220 million ha of agricultural land), the
renewal of land use and land cover maps in a short period
of time can only be carried out using modern computerised
technologies based on remote sensing data and geo-
information systems (GIS). For mapping and monitoring
land cover, satellite remote sensing has the advantage of
collecting up-to-date land cover data with a high spatial
accuracy in comparison with e.g. statistical data, which
have a low spatial accuracy. But until now up-to-date and
accurate land cover data derived from remote sensing
images are only available for a few countries and regions in
Europe.
An existing European data base, fully based on various
sources of land use statistics, is the 10 Minutes
pan-European Land Use data base. The National Institute
of Public Health and Environment of the Netherlands
(RIVM) initiated the construction of the data base in 1994
(Van de Velde et al., 1994; Veldkamp et al., 1995). The
data base distinguishes eight classes: grass, arable land,
permanent crops, inland water, urban areas, extensive
agriculture and natural areas, coniferous/mixed forest and
deciduous forest. This information is present for each cell
measuring 10 geographical minutes (which equals about 10
by 15 km on the average for the area covered), covering
pan-Europe.
In the framework of the EU project 'Pan European Land
Cover Monitoring' (PELCOM), co-ordinated by SC-DLO,
a reference map has been compiled ffom various thematic
land cover sources to get a comprehensive overview of the
96 International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII, Part 7, Budapest, 1998
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