Agricultural land cover monitoring in Russia using remote sensing

One of the most important and urgent problems in Russia nowadays 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. 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. In this study methods based on remote sensing and GIS techniques are applied to monitor agricultural land cover. Main goal is the improvement of agricultural land use monitoring in Russia; A major objective is the identification of the land cover classes which can be observed at different scale levels. Finally, classified coarse resolution images are combined with classified high resolution images in order to obtain detailed classification information for a large region.