Abstract
Land cover changes - due to climate or land use change - are a common challenge for the management of protected areas. Over the last decades, large parts of the European Alps have experienced forest expansion and shrub encroachment as a consequence of land abandonment. Also the Gran Paradiso National Park experiences such vegetation successional processes, which might be a threat to some local habitats and species. Remote sensing is in general a unique tool to map rates and spatial pattern of land cover change even for remote areas that are hard to monitor. In this study, hence, we aim to explore the potential for identifying hotspots of land cover change over the entire area of park based on remote sensing data.