Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Land-Cover Dynamics in the Makariv Territorial Hromada, 2021-2025

Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring

Authors

First and Last Name Academic degree E-mail Affiliation
Polina Hutsova No apolinariy20023003 [at] gmail.com The Ukrainian Researchers Society
Kyiv, Ukraine

I and my co-authors (if any) authorize the use of the Paper in accordance with the Creative Commons CC BY license

First published on this website: 28.08.2026 - 17:33
Abstract 

Monitoring land-cover dynamics is important for understanding spatial transformations of territories affected by rapid environmental and socio-economic changes. The Makariv Territorial Hromada in Kyiv Oblast was selected to assess land-cover dynamics during 2021-2025 using annual 10 m land-use/land-cover data derived from Sentinel-2 imagery. The study aimed to quantify changes in the main land-cover classes, identify dominant interclass transitions, and assess their temporal frequency. Annual raster datasets for 2021-2025 were harmonized to a common projection, extent, spatial resolution, and pixel grid. The areas and shares of seven land-cover classes were calculated each year. Post-classification comparison was used to generate transition matrices for consecutive years and for the direct 2021-2025 comparison. A change-frequency map was produced to determine how many times each pixel changed class during the study period. Crops and Trees dominated the land-cover structure throughout 2021-2025. The largest transitions occurred between Trees, Crops, and Rangeland. The recurrent Crops–Rangeland transitions may reflect changes in agricultural land use, including temporary non-use and subsequent return to cultivation, whereas Trees–Rangeland transitions may partly reflect classification uncertainty. A direct comparison between 2021 and 2025 showed that 91.6% of the territory retained the same land-cover class. The five-year frequency analysis showed that 85.1% of the territory did not change class in any annual interval, while only 2.1% changed three or four times. The results indicate overall land-cover stability combined with localized and recurrent interclass variability, highlighting the need for cautious interpretation of automatically classified annual land-cover products.

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