Environmental changes. Monitoring land cover changes in the Siberian region of Komi. Estimate of the vegetation trend using remote sensing

This report is focused on the individuation of the land cover changes and on the vegetation trend estimation of the Siberian Republic of Komi and supported by the following objectives: understanding which kind of help the remote sensing is able to provide, which social and economics causes drive the degradation and deforestation processes and which would be the consequences of the ecosystems degradation. Using the software ENVI 4.8 and ArcGIS 10, as principal instruments, the images provided by Globe Cover - land cover and Landsat mosaics have been processed to obtain the extent of the unsupervised classifications and the consequent land cover and change detections products, supported by the estimation of errors. The final products showed an high level of deforestation, also on virgin forest, related to the local pulp and paper companies.