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Illegal logging is a major environmental and economic problem, and exceeds in some countries the amounts of legally harvested timber. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, illegal logging increased and reforestation on abandoned farmland was widespread after the breakdown of socialism, and the region's forest cover trends remain overall largely unclear. Our goal here was to map forest cover change and to assess the extent of illegal logging and reforestation in the Ukrainian Carpathians. We used Landsat TM/ETM+ images and Support Vector Machines (SVM) to derive forest change trajectories between 1988 and 2007 for the entire Ukrainian Carpathians. We calculated logging and reforestation rates, and compared Landsat-based forest trends to official statistics and inventory maps. Our classification resulted in reliable forest/non-forest maps (overall accuracies between 97.1%–98.01%) and high …