Abandonment and Expansion of Arable Land in Europe

Abstract

Abandonment of arable land is often assumed to happen mostly in marginal areas where the conditions for arable cultivation are relatively unfavorable, whereas arable expansion is expected to occur mostly in areas with favorable conditions. This assumption, used in many land-use change forecasts, was never properly tested, mainly because the relatively short period of full-coverage land-use inventories did not allow a systematic analysis of the phenomena. With the recent release of CORINE 2006 this has changed. In this article, we explore the typical locations of abandonment and expansion of arable land in Europe during the period 1990-2006 by means of logistic regressions. More specifically, we test whether or not locations of abandonment and expansion can be inferred from the location characteristics of arable land in 1990. If the above assumption holds, this should be the case. We demonstrate that although arable expansion indeed happens in locations that resemble the bulk of arable land in 1990 (the presumably favorable locations), arable abandonment does not necessarily happen in locations that resemble the bulk of uncultivated land (that is, the presumably unfavorable locations). In other words, the assumption does not hold. Particularly, areas close to the road network were found to be associated with both high abandonment rates and high expansion rates, which suggest that abandonment is not limited to areas that are marginal in terms of agricultural production.

Drivers of grassland loss in Hungary during the post-socialist transformation (1987–1999)

“…Dominant land cover changes in Eastern and East-Central Europe in the 1985-2000 period were farmland abandonment, afforestation, forest overutilisation and in some areas cropland expansion (Bičík et al 2001;Palang 2006;Kuemmerle et al 2007Kuemmerle et al , 2008Łowicki 2008;Lakes et al 2009;15 Main-Knorn et al 2009;Feranec et al 2010;Hatna and Bakker 2011;Baumann et al 2011), while in Western Europe urbanization, afforestation and in many areas farmland abandonment (Hietel et al 2005;Falcucci et al 2007;Feranec et al 2007Feranec et al , 2010Schneeberger et al 2007a,b;Hersperger et al 2009;Gimmi et al 2011;Monteiro et al 2011). We argue, that any unusual processes (e.g.…”

“…We argue, that 15 lack of knowledge on historical legacies and local specificities might be important reasons why European scale maps e.g. for agricultural intensity and land cover changes (Feranec et al 2010, Temme and Verburg 2011, Hatna and Bakker 2011 are often incorrect in Eastern and East-Central Europe. However, data in adequate spatial resolutions, and time shots of many driving factors are missing for large areas in these regions, which strongly limits precise modelling of recent and 20 future land-cover and land-use changes.…”

“…Most landscape change studies in this region focus on changes in forestry practices, forest cover and pattern changes and were mainly performed in the Carpathians, where deforestation, forest and bush encroachment, and changing tree composition were found to be the most common changes (Kuemmerle et al 2007;Main-Knorn 2009). On the other hand, 15 farmland abandonment is also of major concern in many areas (Bičík et al 2001;Lakes et al 2009;Baumann et al 2011;Hatna and Bakker 2011). These studies show that in several East-Central European countries, including Poland, Czech Republik, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, the most important land cover changes during the period of socialist-capitalist transformation were similar (abandonment of farmland, overexploitation of forests and afforestation), but the intensity 20 and also, partly, the direction of the changes varied significantly across regions.…”

Biomass and selected morphological traits of fine roots in young pine stand growingon formerly arable land

“…In recent years the surface area of formerly arable lands in Poland and Europe has significantly increased. It is due to changes in global and local economics, politics and environmental protection policies (Hatna and Bakker, 2011). Very important issue here is how do we understand our goals in that field.…”

Agricultural land abandonment in Mediterranean environment provides ecosystem services via soil carbon sequestration

“…Land abandonment has occurred mainly in developed countries as a consequence of the intensification of agriculture and the reduction of the agriculture land necessary to feed the population (Alonso-Sarría et al, 2016;Kou et al, 2016). This is mainly found in Europe, where numerous research studies have been published (Hatna and Bakker, 2011;MacDonald et al, 2000). This abandonment is most extensive and studied in the European Mediterranean belt (Plieninger et al, 2014;Romero-Díaz et al, 2016;Sheffer, 2012), and most of the research focuses on the mountainous regions that were abandoned as a consequence of the low income and loss of population (Lasanta et al, 2015a).…”