Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Current geopolitical climate in European Union land border is volatile amid Russian hybrid influence operations. There have, for example, been attempts at using migrants to destabilize border control measures of European Union member states. This has led to a closure of official border stations and temporal cease in handling of visa applications by Finnish authorities in Finnish Russian border. Regardless of the border closure, an elevated risk of illegal attempts to cross the border remains. While the authorities are monitoring the border area and preventing illegal crossings, it is important to have an understanding of spatial permeability along the border. Spatial permeability of Finnish Russian border was studied in 40-kilometer buffer area around the border line. Refined land cover data along with slope degrees and locations of border stations were used to produce friction layers that illustrate spatial permeability in the study area. Two scenarios were studied, the former considering effects of land cover and slope data, and the latter combining these with the locations of border stations. Friction layers were used for cost distance and cost pathway analyses, and optimal routes for border crossing were calculated from 10 towns in Russia to 13 destination towns in Finland. Results show that dense road networks in southern border areas effectively facilitate human mobility in otherwise challenging environments, while in the north the rural nature of the landscape combined with longer travel distances and lack of road networks acts as a barrier that decreases spatial permeability. Optimal paths across the border mostly used secondary roads to get close to the border and traverse short distances of less than a kilometer on either forests, grasslands or croplands to cross the border line. Spots of crossing the border line were mostly located in areas where secondary roads were closest to each other on both sides of the border, leaving the shortest possible distances to be covered on other less suitable land cover types.
Source: UTUPub (University of Turku)
Author: Luomi, Jesse
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Turun Yliopisto
OpenAlex ID: W7119571904