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

Abstract

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.

Mapping Cropland Abandonment in the Aral Sea Basin with MODIS Time Series

“…In contrast, active cropland resulted in NDVI temporal profiles with substantially smaller growing season NDVI integrals and a higher NDVI value during the peak of vegetation growth than those of abandoned plots ( Figure 2) [73]. Using Google Earth TM to create and validate maps of abandonment and other land cover was also reported in other studies [29,30,35,74,75].…”

“…Much progress has been made in mapping land-use/land-cover changes (LULCCs) in drylands using geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, such as with 30-m multiannual imagery from Landsat [25,26], high-resolution RapidEye or Sentinel [7,27,28] and 250-m Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data [29,30]. MODIS data fit well for assessing and mapping LULCC and crop types [31] or land abandonment over large regions in a regular manner [32][33][34][35]. Additionally, since fallow periods can be part of the typical crop rotation cycle, it is important to assess several consecutive years to determine whether a field has effectively been abandoned or if it is awaiting future use [7].…”

Towards an Improved Environmental Understanding of Land Surface Dynamics in Ukraine Based on Multi-Source Remote Sensing Time-Series Datasets from 1982 to 2013

“…We used a subtractive model for visualization, where the primary factors are illustrated with a pure color and the overlapping areas of influence are depicted by the intersection of colors. Although the studies have discussed the impact of climatic variation on land surface changes [33,55,56], very few of them have focused on the impact of environmental factors on land surface trends in Ukraine as opposed to management and land tenure factors [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Our results show that the changes in land surface can be partially explained by the combination of thermal and water conditions.…”

“…The reversal trend indicating trend change from increase to decrease stated the decline of ecosystem functioning. We suggest that these types of changes can be associated with the large socioeconomic disturbances followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and associated processes of land abandonment after 1991 and land re-cultivation after the 2000s [6,7].…”

“…In addition, the scale compatibility was another issue, as the datasets might be not representative for an 8 km grid [53]. To overcome this, we compared our results with the results of the previous studies [1,[4][5][6][7][8][9] and investigated the validity of the results by local experts. …”