Land-use change in the Caucasus during and after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
Socioeconomic shocks can shape future land-use trajectories. Armed conflicts are an extreme form of a socioeconomic shock, but our understanding of how armed conflicts affect land-use change is limited. Our goal was to assess land-use changes related to the 1991–1994 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Caucasus region. We classified multi-temporal Landsat imagery, mapped land-use changes during and after the conflict, and applied matching statistics to isolate the effect of the conflict from other potential drivers of land change.