Development and Application of Earth Observation Based Machine Learning Methods for Characterizing Forest and Land Cover Change in Dilijan National Park of Armenia between 1991 and 2019

Dilijan National Park is one of the most important national parks of Armenia, established in 2002 to protect its rich biodiversity of flora and fauna and to prevent illegal logging. The aim of this study is to provide first, a mapping of forest degradation and deforestation, and second, of land cover/land use changes every 5 years over a 28-year monitoring cycle from 1991 to 2019, using Sentinel-2 and Landsat time series and Machine Learning methods. Very High Spatial Resolution imagery was used for calibration and validation purposes of forest density modelling and related changes. Correlation coefficient R2 between forest density map and reference values ranges from 0.70 for the earliest epoch to 0.90 for the latest one. Land cover/land use classification yield good results with most classes showing high users’ and producers’ accuracies above 80%. Although forest degradation and deforestation which initiated about 30 years ago was restrained thanks to protection measures, anthropogenic pressure remains a threat with the increase in settlements, tourism, or agriculture. This case study can be used as a decision-support tool for the Armenian Government for sustainable forest management and policies and serve as a model for a future nationwide forest monitoring system.