Exploring the land use changes in Eastern Poland: statistics-based modeling

The study analyzed changes in surface areas of individual land use types in five administrative regions of Poland in the eastern-most part of the country. Annual time series for the following variables were used: agricultural land, forest land, built-up and urbanized land, and wasteland. The primary objective of the paper was to assess land use changes (LUC) in Eastern Poland in 2002-2016. The paper employed a Mann-Kendall (MK) test and Cox-Stuart (CS) test for monotonic trend and the autoregressive-moving-average (ARMA) model. The deterministic part was selected with the Akaike criterion. The power of the tests was estimated using the Monte Carlo simulation in order to assess their reliability. The results indicate a trend in each of the four series in all the five voivodeships. For forest and built-up land, the trend was upward in each voivodeship. A downward trend was found for the agricultural land and wasteland in all the voivodeships except the Podkarpackie Voivodeship. The results can help regional and local authorities to properly monitor LUC.