The main goals of this study are the objectbased land-cover classification of LANDSAT-8 satellite imagery of 2014 and 2015, the quantitative assessment of gross and net changes of agricultural land, built-up areas, forest, bare soil and forest between 2014 and 2015, the quantification of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) rates within these land-cover classes, and the change detection analysis between the NDVIs. The achieved overall accuracies of object-based classification for the 2014 and the 2015 land-cover maps were 82 and 87 %, respectively. Therefore, the achieved accuracies were considered to be acceptable for quantified change detection analyses. For the gross areas of agricultural land, forest and built-up areas an increase was observed. The agricultural gross area was 30,911 km 2 in 2014 and 31,999 km 2 in 2015. The gross area of the built-up land increased from 12,550 to 13,548 km 2. The gross area of forest land changed from 8211 to 9175 km 2. A decrease was observed in the gross area of grassland from 28,229 to 24,925 km 2. This was primarily related to the land-cover shifts driven by agricultural activities. The gross areas of Keywords Land-cover Á Change detection Á Gross and net change Á LANDSAT-8 (OLI) Á Segmentation Á Classification & Emil Bayramov

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