Annual Landsat time series reveal post-Soviet changes in grazing pressure

Dara, Andrey; Baumann, Matthias; Freitag, Martin; Hölzel, Norbert; Hostert, Patrick; Kamp, Johannes; Müller, Daniel; Prishchepov, Alexander V.; Kuemmerle, Tobias

doi:10.1016/j.rse.2020.111667

Cited by 52 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 211 publications

(373 reference statements)

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“…The natural vegetation of northern Kazakhstan are forest steppes, steppes, and semi-deserts [14], but today the area is largely used for rainfed agriculture, primarily to grow wheat (hereafter cropland) [38] and livestock grazing (hereafter grassland). After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, livestock numbers collapsed and grazing on large pasture areas stopped [41]. Our study region had approximately 44% grassland cover in the historical time period and 38% in the contemporary period (figure 2).…”

Section: (A) Study Areamentioning

confidence: 89%

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Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion

et al. 2020

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Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using Cold War spy satellite images (Corona), we show that a grassland keystone species, the bobak marmot ( Marmota bobak ), continues to respond to agricultural expansion that happened more than 50 years ago. Although burrow densities of the bobak marmot today are highest in croplands, densities declined most strongly in areas that were persistently used as croplands since the 1960s. This response to historical agricultural conversion spans roughly eight marmot generations and suggests the longest recorded response of a mammal species to agricultural expansion. We also found evidence for remarkable philopatry: nearly half of all burrows retained their exact location since the 1960s, and this was most pronounced in grasslands. Our results stress the need for farsighted decisions, because contemporary land management will affect biodiversity decades into the future. Finally, our work pioneers the use of Corona historical Cold War spy satellite imagery for ecology. This vastly underused global remote sensing resource provides a unique opportunity to expand the time horizon of broad-scale ecological studies.

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Section: (A) Study Areamentioning

confidence: 89%

“…R. Soc. B 287: 20192897 these are diminishing as agricultural recultivation and transition to no-till agriculture have increased since the early 2000s [38,41].…”

Section: (A) Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion

et al. 2020

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“…We used a spatial grazing pressure dataset for 1990 and 2015 from our own previous work (Dara, Baumann, Freitag, et al, 2020).…”

Section: Regional-scale Livestock Grazing and Fire Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In parallel, livestock numbers declined drastically (Kamp et al, 2011;Robinson & Milner-Gulland, 2003). Grazing by private-owned livestock is now concentrated in areas close to intact settlements (Kerven et al, 2016a;Robinson et al, 2017) such that the declines in livestock left behind large areas of abandoned pastures, especially in more remote areas with deserted rural settlements (Dara, Baumann, Freitag, et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The collapse in livestock numbers and the associated increase in plant biomass likely caused an increase in fires on the steppes of Russia and Kazakhstan Dubinin et al, 2011), which have recently become a global fire hotspot (Archibald et al, 2013). These are the same areas where overall grazing pressure has decreased massively (Dara, Baumann, Freitag, et al, 2020). Yet, there is substantial heterogeneity in both fire and grazing trends across the region (Hilker et al, 2014;Loboda et al, 2012), and it is poorly understood how regional-scale changes in grazing and fire patterns translate into changes in the functional composition of steppe vegetation and how this affects ecosystem processes such as carbon and nitrogen cycling (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Post‐Soviet shifts in grazing and fire regimes changed the functional plant community composition on the Eurasian steppe

Freitag

Kamp

Dara

et al. 2020

Global Change Biology

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Globally, grasslands are shaped by grazing and fire, and grassland plants are adapted to these disturbances. However, temperate grasslands have been hotspots of land‐use change, and how such changes affect interrelations between herbivory, fire and vegetation are poorly understood. Such land‐use changes are widespread on the Eurasian steppe, where the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered the abandonment of cropland and pasture on globally relevant scales. Thus, to determine how relationships between plant functional composition, grazing and fire patterns changed after the Soviet Union dissolved, we studied a 358,000 km2 region in the dry steppe of Kazakhstan, combining a large field dataset on plant functional traits with multi‐scale satellite data. We found that increases in burned area corresponded to decreases in livestock grazing across large areas. Furthermore, fires occurred more often with high cover of grasses with high leaf dry matter content and thus higher flammability, whereas higher grazing pressure favoured grazing‐tolerant woody forbs and ruderal plants with high specific leaf area. The current situation of low grazing pressure represents a historically exceptional, potentially non‐analogue state. We suggest that the dissolution of the Soviet Union caused the disturbance regime to shift from grazer to fire control. As grazing and fire each result in different plant functional compositions, we propose that this led to widespread increases in grasses and associated changes in steppe plant community structure. These changes have potentially occurred across an area of more than 2 million km2, representing much of the world's largest temperate grassland area, with globally relevant, yet poorly understood implications for biodiversity and ecosystem functions such as carbon cycling. Additionally, future steppe management must also consider positive implications of abandonment (‘rewilding’) because reverting the regime shift in disturbance and associated changes in vegetation would require grazing animals to be reintroduced across vast areas.

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The fate of rangelands: Revealing past and predicting future land‐cover transitions from 1985 to 2036 in the drylands of Central Iran

et al. 2021

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Land serves as a vital production resource, and therefore land planning plays an important role in sustainable land‐use design. Iran includes large areas of the world's drylands, many of which are used as rangelands, and where the population has increased by 60% from 1985 to 2016. Further population increase in Iran would probably require more land resources to be allocated for human needs. However, the pace and patterns of these changes remain unclear. The aim of this study was to map land‐cover change from 1985 to 2016 and predict future land‐cover change in the Zayandehrood ecologic sub‐basins of Central Iran. By using multiseasonal LANDSAT imagery, we mapped land‐cover change with a Random Forest classifier for 1985, 1998, and 2016 with an overall accuracy of 80% for each period. Classification results revealed that from 1985 to 2016 residential areas doubled and industrial areas increased at the expense of rangelands. Our study also revealed cropland expansion at the expense of rangelands, cropland abandonment, and contraction of croplands due to residential and industrial development. Prediction of changes by 2036 with a multilayer perceptron neural network and Markov chain analysis showed further expansion of industries and residencies, particularly near the Ghamashlu Wildlife Refuge. Despite the partial restoration of rangelands in some parts of the world, our study provides evidence of ongoing rangeland degradation in Iran due to conversion to other land uses. Therefore, the study underscores the importance of sustainable land management of already cultivated areas and the development of strategies for the protection of global rangelands.

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Annual Landsat time series reveal post-Soviet changes in grazing pressure

Cited by 52 publications

References 211 publications

Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion

Cold War spy satellite images reveal long-term declines of a philopatric keystone species in response to cropland expansion

Post‐Soviet shifts in grazing and fire regimes changed the functional plant community composition on the Eurasian steppe

The fate of rangelands: Revealing past and predicting future land‐cover transitions from 1985 to 2036 in the drylands of Central Iran

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