Mapping cropland abandonment in the Aral Sea Basin with MODIS time series

Fabian Löw, Alexander Prishchepov (), François Waldner, Olena Dubovyk, Akmal Akramkhanov, Chandrashekhar Biradar and John P. Lamers

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2018, vol. 10, issue 2, 1-24

Abstract: Cropland abandonment is globally widespread and has strong repercussions for regional food security and the environment. Statistics suggest that one of the hotspots of abandoned cropland is located in the drylands of the Aral Sea Basin (ASB), which covers parts of post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. To date, the exact spatial and temporal extents of abandoned cropland remain unclear, which hampers land-use planning. Abandoned land is a potentially valuable resource for alternative land uses. Here, we mapped the abandoned cropland in the drylands of the ASB with a time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from 2003–2016. To overcome the restricted ability of a single classifier to accurately map land-use classes across large areas and agro-environmental gradients, “stratum-specific” classifiers were calibrated and classification results were fused based on a locally weighted decision fusion approach. Next, the agro-ecological suitability of abandoned cropland areas was evaluated. The stratum-specific classification approach yielded an overall accuracy of 0.879, which was significantly more accurate ( p

Keywords: abandoned cropland; Aral Sea Basin; change detection; land use; decision fusion; MODIS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:182014

DOI: 10.3390/rs10020159

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