Ukrainian cropland through decades: 1990–2016

In this paper we present the results of trend analysis of cropland change since 1990 to 2016 in Ukraine. The analysis is performed on the basis of cross-comparison of official statistical data from State Service of Statistics of Ukraine and crop type maps developed by our team for the territory of Ukraine for three decades, namely 1990s, 2000s and 2010s and 2016. Crop type maps built with use of multi-temporal Landsat-4/5/7 and Sentinel-1/2 satellites imagery and an ensemble of neural networks, in particular multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). This analysis shows significant cropland areas decrease over the territory of Ukraine.