Mapping Land Use and Habitat Changes in the Caucasus Through Spy Satellite Data

CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

About the lecture: The legacy of past human activities strongly shapes current landscapes and ecosystems, with today’s actions set to leave similar long-term impacts. Predicting future landscape changes, however, requires a thorough understanding of past ones, yet most land and habitat change studies are limited to recent decades—starting only in the 1980s with the availability of 30-m satellite data or in the 2000s with commercial high-resolution satellites. This presentation will introduce an alternative approach, using high-resolution imagery from the 1960s U.S. Corona spy satellites series to trace landscape changes over the past half-century. Focusing on the diverse Caucasus region, with its wide variation in elevation, climate, ecosystems, and historical land-use patterns, this presentation will highlight methods to create detailed land cover maps capturing landscapes before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. These historical maps provide a unique perspective on land changes, as well as habitat changes for wild species. This presentation will underscore the value of 1960s spy satellite data for understanding long-term land cover and habitat changes of large ungulate species, offering new insights into historical land use and its implications for wildlife and conservation. About the speaker: Afag (pronounced ah-fah) is a remote sensing and conservation expert with extensive field experience in the Caucasus region. Currently an Honorary Fellow at the SILVIS Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (https://silvis.forest.wisc.edu/people/), she holds a PhD in Forestry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Postgraduate Diploma in Wildlife Conservation from the University of Oxford. Afag’s research employs high-resolution satellite data to map historical land cover in the Caucasus eco-region, investigating long-term landscape changes and their impacts on wild habitats. Her past work has contributed to projects in wild mammal species’ reintroduction, habitat management, and human-wildlife conflict mitigation, and she has shared her findings in various publications (link to google scholar – https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=sqSt3H4AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao). In addition, employed as a data scientist at Spatial Informatics Group (SIG), she is currently involved in environmental projects in developing countries. Fluent in three languages and conversant in two others, Afag brings a global perspective to her work.