A Regional Land Use Assessment with Collect Earth: Case Studies of Agdash and Gakh, Azerbaijan

Periodic land use and land use change assessments monitor the total extent and changes in all land use categories and sub-categories over time to generate highly accurate activity data for effective land use planning and management. Collect Earth is a free access software to monitor the land-use trends in land-use categories over time. The study reports forest and other land-use extent estimates in Azerbaijan’s Agdash and Gakh regions, analyzing 2,543 0.5-hectare sample plots using visual interpretation of very high spatial and temporal resolution satellite imagery on the Google Earth platform. Forestlands in Agdash were assessed to be approximately 7,037 ha or 6.9% of the total region area and have declined by 1.3% since 2000. In contrast, grasslands have grown approximately by 2.07%. Tree cover only exists in 20.9% of Agdash, totaling 21,296 ha. More than 67% of tree cover exists in other land-use categories. The study succeeded in identifying disturbances like flooding, fire, logging, and grazing, and found evidence of river erosion types, rainfall surface runoff, and landslides in Agdash. Gakh forests were assessed to be approximately 41,662 ha or 28% of the total region area. No land use changes were observed in forestlands, other lands, wetlands, or settlements in Gakh since 2000, whereas 104 ha of grasslands were converted to croplands. Trees are present on 49.3% of total land, equal to 73,508 ha. Approximately 56.7% of total tree cover exists in forestlands, and 43.3% exists outside of forests. The research detected disturbances such as logging, fire, and grazing, and found signs of wind, river, coastal, rainfall-runoff, and landslide erosion in Gakh.