Mapping the extent of abandoned farmland in Central and Eastern Europe using MODIS time series satellite data

By C. Alcántara, Tobias Kuemmerle, Matthias Baumann, E. Bragina, Patrick Griffiths, Patrick Hostert, J. Knorn, Daniel Müller, Alexander V. Prishchepov, F. Schierhorn and 2 more. 2013

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The demand for agricultural products continues to grow rapidly, but further agricultural expansion entails substantial environmental costs, making recultivating currently unused farmland an interesting alternative. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to widespread abandonment of agricultural lands, but the extent and spatial patterns of abandonment are unclear. We quantified the extent of abandoned farmland, both croplands and pastures, across the region using MODIS NDVI satellite image time series from 2004 to 2006 and support vector machine classifications. Abandoned farmland was widespread, totaling 52.5 Mha, particularly in temperate European Russia (32 Mha), northern and western Ukraine, and Belarus. Differences in abandonment rates among countries were striking, suggesting that institutional and socio-economic factors were more important in determining the amount of abandonment than biophysical conditions. Indeed, much abandoned farmland occurred in areas without major constraints for agriculture. Our map provides a basis for assessing the potential of Central and Eastern Europe’s abandoned agricultural lands to contribute to food or bioenergy production, or carbon storage, as well as the environmental trade-offs and social constraints of recultivation.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cf3d3326386d71c1ace47f4ee43d7b422631ccf2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Hendrik Boogaard
2. Laixiang Sun
3. Sotirios V. Archontoulis
4. Jürgen Dengler
5. K. Wesche
6. S. Tramberend
7. Xiubing Li
8. J. Spink

In Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

1. Johannes Kamp
2. Jürgen Dengler
3. K. Wesche
4. S. Tramberend
5. Xiubing Li

Citations in the corpus

• Cereal yield gaps across Europe (2018, background): “Our study only considered reducing yield gaps on existing cropland, whereas re-cultivation of abandoned farmland, which is widespread in temperate European Russia, northern and western Ukraine, and Belarus (Alcantara et al., 2013), can also contribute to increased production.”
• An estimation of the extent of cropland abandonment in mountainous regions of China (2018, methodology): “Remote sensing techniques, which are the most popular and efficient method to map the extent of abandoned cropland and estimate the abandoned rate, have been widely applied to detect the farmland abandonment in Europe: Central and East Europe (Alcantara et al., 2013; Kuemmerle et al., 2008; Prishche”
• The Palaearctic steppe biome: a new synthesis (2016, background): “In recent decades, however, land abandonment increased in post-communist countries (Alcantara et al. 2013) such as Russia, where almost 260,000 km(2) of arable land were abandoned in the last two decades (Smelansky and Tishkov 2012), or in Turkey, where rural workers migrated to Turkish cities or ev”