Land degradation is one of the most pressing problems ensuring sustainable use of land. In order to provide a clear understanding of land degradation and its risks, as well as to implement unified measures for prevention of land degradation in Latvia, the Land Management Law came into force in 2015. It individually defines the concepts of land and soil degradation, thus separating them from each other, as well as clarifying the term “degraded territory”. However, despite these solutions in the regulatory framework of the land degradation, till now criteria for identifying land degradation have not been developed and approved, therefore their determination is very subjective and not comparable between municipalities and at the state level. The aim of the article is to develop and approbate degradation criteria for assessing land degradation in particular territory. In the article, based on the author's previous studies on the classification of land degradation, characterised one type of land degradation – the abandoned agricultural and forestry activity territory, as well as proposed subdivision of criteria classification into three levels – low, medium and high. As result of the study, it was concluded that the classification of degraded territories into three degradation levels is justified for the purpose of more objective identification and evaluation of land degradation.

According to the official statistics the areas of abandoned agricultural land in Lithuania are gradually decreasing, but very slightly. The aim of this study is to research spatial determination and abandoned land classification in the territory of Vilnius District Municipality. Vilnius District Municipality was chosen for the research because it, although located near the capital of the country and has a high population density, it is still the district having the largest percent of abandoned land plots. A fast, cost-effective and sufficiently accurate method for determination of abandoned land plots would allow to constantly monitoring, to fix changes and foresee the abandoned land plots reduction possibilities. In the study there was used the multispectral RGB and NIR colour Sentinel-2 satellite images, the layer of the administrative boundary of Vilnius County and layer of abandoned agriculture land, which is available in Lithuanian Spatial Information Portal (www.geoportal.lt). The data was processed by Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques using classical classification Region Growing Algorithm. The research shows that NIR image classification result is more reliable than the result from RGB images.