Determinants of agricultural land abandonment in post-Soviet European Russia

Socio-economic and institutional changes may accelerate the rates and determinants of land-use and land-cover change (LULCC). Our goal was to explore the determinants of agricultural land abandonment in post-soviet Russia during the first decade of transition from-state command to market driven economy from 1990 to 2000. Based on economic assumptions of the profit maximization we selected and analyzed the determinants of agricultural land abandonment for one large agro-climatic and economic region of European Russia that covered 150,500 km2 and 67 districts in Kaluga, Rjazan, Smolensk, Tula and Vladimir provinces. We integrated maps of abandoned agricultural land (five Landsat TM/ETM+ footprints 185*185 km each with 30-m resolution), environmental and geographic determinants, and socioeconomic statistics and estimated logistic regressions at the pixel-level. Our results showed that agricultural land abandonment was significantly associated with lower average grain yields in the late 1980s, distances to villages, municipalities and settlements > 500 citizens, isolated agricultural areas within the forest matrix and distances from forest edges. Hierarchical partitioning showed that average grain yields in the late 1980s contributed the most in explaining the variability of abandonment (42%, of the explained variability), followed by location characteristics of the land. The results suggest that the underling driving forces such as massive decline of state subsidies for agriculture was a key contributor for the amount of abandonment and those areas socially, economically and environmentally marginal agriculture areas were the first to be left uncultivated.

[1]  G. Perry,et al.  Regression Techniques for Examining Land Use/Cover Change: A Case Study of a Mediterranean Landscape , 2007, Ecosystems.

[2]  Andrew Warren,et al.  Land Use Policy , 1989 .

[3]  D. Munroe,et al.  Changing Rural Landscapes in Albania: Cropland Abandonment and Forest Clearing in the Postsocialist Transition , 2008 .

[4]  R. Mac Nally,et al.  Hierarchical partitioning as an interpretative tool in multivariate inference , 1996 .

[5]  A. Albrektson,et al.  An analysis of successful natural regeneration of downy and silver birch on abandoned farmland in Sweden. , 1998 .

[6]  H. Theil.  Introduction to econometrics , 1978 .

[7]  E. Lambin,et al.  INAUGURAL ARTICLE by a Recently Elected Academy Member:Global land use change, economic globalization, and the looming land scarcity , 2011 .

[8]  G. Ioffe,et al.  Marginal Farmland in European Russia , 2004 .

[9]  J. Zimmerman,et al.  The Ecological Consequences of Socioeconomic and Land-Use Changes in Postagriculture Puerto Rico , 2003 .

[10]  I. Zaslavsky,et al.  The End of Peasantry?: The Disintegration of Rural Russia , 2006 .

[11]  Z. Lerman.  Land policies and evolving farm structures in transition countries , 2002 .

[12]  M. Rizov.  Agriculture in Transition: Land Policies and Evolving Farm Structures in Post-Soviet Countries , 2005 .

[13]  A. Gibon,et al.  Agricultural abandonment in mountain areas of Europe: Environmental consequences and policy response , 2000 .

[14]  B. Koch,et al.  Agricultural land abandonment and natural forest re-growth in the Swiss mountains: A spatially explicit economic analysis , 2007 .

[15]  D. Tilman,et al.  Global environmental impacts of agricultural expansion: the need for sustainable and efficient practices. , 1999, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[16]  D. Munroe,et al.  Tradeoffs between Rural Development Policies and Forest Protection: Spatially Explicit Modeling in the Central Highlands of Vietnam , 2005, Land Economics.

[17]  Erich Barke,et al.  Hierarchical partitioning , 1996, Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Aided Design.

[18]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Rapid land use change after socio-economic disturbances: the collapse of the Soviet Union versus Chernobyl , 2011 .

[19]  A. Bouchard,et al.  Abandoned farmlands as components of rural landscapes: An analysis of perceptions and representations , 2007 .

[20]  S. Linden,et al.  Cross-border Comparison of Post-socialist Farmland Abandonment in the Carpathians , 2008, Ecosystems.

[21]  K. Chomitz,et al.  Roads, land use, and deforestation : a spatial model applied to Belize , 1996 .

[22]  Eric F. Lambin,et al.  The causes of the reforestation in Vietnam , 2008 .

[23]  P. Stålnacke,et al.  Temporal and Spatial Variation of Nutrient Levels in the Nemunas River (Lithuania and Belarus) , 2006, Environmental monitoring and assessment.

[24]  Sylvia H. Larsson,et al.  A remote sensing methodology to assess the costs of preparing abandoned farmland for energy crop cultivation in northern Sweden , 2005 .

[25]  P. J. Huber.  The behavior of maximum likelihood estimates under nonstandard conditions , 1967 .

[26]  V. Radeloff,et al.  Effects of institutional changes on land use: agricultural land abandonment during the transition from state-command to market-driven economies in post-Soviet Eastern Europe , 2012 .

[27]  H. White.  Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Misspecified Models , 1982 .

[28]  Lone Søderkvist Kristensen,et al.  Landscape changes in agrarian landscapes in the 1990s: the interaction between farmers and the farmed landscape. A case study from Jutland, Denmark. , 2004, Journal of environmental management.

[29]  R. Gil Pontius,et al.  Land-cover change model validation by an ROC method for the Ipswich watershed, Massachusetts, USA , 2001 .

[30]  P. Angelstam,et al.  Implementing sustainable forest management in Ukraine's Carpathian Mountains: The role of traditional village systems , 2007 .

[31]  Marc Antrop,et al.  Analyzing structural and functional changes of traditional landscapes—two examples from Southern France , 2004 .

[32]  E. Irwin,et al.  Theory, data, methods: developing spatially explicit economic models of land use change , 2001 .

[33]  S. Vanwambeke,et al.  From USSR to EU: 20 years of rural landscape changes in Vidzeme, Latvia , 2012 .

[34]  V. Kontorovich.  The Russian health crisis and the economy. , 2001, Communist and post-communist studies.

[35]  Volker C. Radeloff,et al.  The effect of Landsat ETM/ETM + image acquisition dates on the detection of agricultural land abandonment in Eastern Europe , 2012 .

[36]  D. Wasserman,et al.  Changes in life expectancy in Russia , 2001, The Lancet.

[37]  R. Aunap,et al.  Changes in agricultural land use in Estonia in the 1990s detected with multitemporal Landsat MSS imagery , 1998 .

[38]  N. Batjes.  Soil data resources for land suitability assessment and environmental protection in central and eastern Europe: the 1:2,500,000 scale SOVEUR project , 2001 .

[39]  H. Mooney,et al.  Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems , 1997, Renewable Energy.

[40]  J. Wooldridge.  Introduction to Econometrics , 2013 .

[41]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Patterns and drivers of post-socialist farmland abandonment in Western Ukraine , 2011 .

[42]  Daniel Müller,et al.  Land use dynamics in the central highlands of Vietnam: a spatial model combining village survey data with satellite imagery interpretation , 2002 .

[43]  C. Arnade,et al.  Crop Yield Convergence: How Russia's Yield Performance Has Compared to Global Yield Leaders , 2001 .

[44]  Michael A. Trueblood,et al.  Corporate Farm Performance in Russia, 1991–1995: An Efficiency Analysis☆ , 1999 .

[45]  E. V. Milanova,et al.  Land use/cover change in Russia: mapping and GIS , 1999 .

[46]  J. M. DeLeo,et al.  Receiver operating characteristic laboratory (ROCLAB): Software for developing decision strategies that account for uncertainty , 1993, 1993 (2nd) International Symposium on Uncertainty Modeling and Analysis.

[47]  P. Ciais,et al.  Soil carbon sequestration or biofuel production: new land-use opportunities for mitigating climate over abandoned Soviet farmlands. , 2009, Environmental science & technology.

[48]  Z. Lerman,et al.  Land policies and agricultural land markets in Russia , 2007 .

[49]  T. Kuemmerle,et al.  Lost in transition: determinants of post-socialist cropland abandonment in Romania , 2009 .

[50]  G. Powell,et al.  Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth , 2001 .

[51]  V. Radeloff,et al.  Author's Personal Copy Mapping Abandoned Agriculture with Multi-temporal Modis Satellite Data , 2022 .

[52]  Volker C. Radeloff,et al.  Reconstructing long time series of burned areas in arid grasslands of southern Russia by satellite remote sensing , 2010 .

[53]  Kathleen M. Bergen,et al.  Changing Regimes: Forested Land-cover Dynamics in Central Siberia 1974 to 2001 , 2008 .

[54]  Ilya Zaslavsky,et al.  From Spatial Continuity to Fragmentation: The Case of Russian Farming , 2004 .

[55]  Martha M. Bakker,et al.  The destination of arable land in a marginal agricultural landscape in South Portugal: an exploration of land use change determinants , 2007, Landscape Ecology.

[56]  D. Müller,et al.  Effects of postsocialist reforms on land cover and land use in South-Eastern Albania , 2006 .