Vegetation change detection for mapping the effects of global climatic change: A test case in Northern Finland using satellite remote sensing

It has been predicted that some boreal tree species would migrate north several hundred meters per year to coincide with the predicted global warming due to doubling CO₂ by the middle of next century. It has been said that large parts of the boreal forest and tundra will migrate and disappear because of global warming. Twenty years have passed since the Landsat 1 launching and the average global temperature has shown a tendency to increase over these two decades. The basic concepts of monitoring vegetation shifts using satellite data are described in this paper. A system for the detection of vegetation shifts was tested in northern Finland using Landsat data, however, no clear evidence of shifts was observed.