Changes in agricultural land use in Estonia in the 1990s detected with multitemporal Landsat MSS imagery

During the 1990s, the largest changes in land use in the Baltic states ocurred in the agricultural land sector. The changes can be summarised as the abandonment of arable land and the overgrowing of grasslands with shrubs. Both types of formerly agricultural land become successional oldfields. A national land-use map of Estonia is currently not available. Multitemporal Landsat Multispectral Scanner scenes combining winter, spring and summer data were used to classify land use in Estonia in 1990 and 1993. Satellite data discriminated ‘arable landʹ and ‘other,ʹ but failed to differentiate ‘grasslands currently in useʹ from ‘successional oldfieldsʹ. One-third of the arable land in use in Estonia in 1990 had been abandoned by 1993.