Rapid land use change after socio-economic disturbances: the collapse of the Soviet Union versus Chernobyl

Abstract

Land use change is a principal force and inherent element of global environmental change, threatening biodiversity, natural ecosystems, and their services. However, our ability to anticipate future land use change is severely limited by a lack of understanding of how major socio-economic disturbances (e.g., wars, revolutions, policy changes, and economic crises) affect land use. Here we explored to what extent socio-economic disturbances can shift land use systems onto a different trajectory, and whether this can result in less intensive land use. Our results show that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 caused a major reorganization in land use systems. The effects of this socio-economic disturbance were at least as drastic as those of the nuclear disaster in the Chernobyl region in 1986. While the magnitudes of land abandonment were similar in Ukraine and Belarus in the case of the nuclear disaster (28% and 36% of previously farmed land, respectively), the rates of land abandonment after the collapse of the Soviet Union in Ukraine were twice as high as those in Belarus. This highlights that national policies and institutions play an important role in mediating effects of socio-economic disturbances. The socio-economic disturbance that we studied caused major hardship for local populations, yet also presents opportunities for conservation, as natural ecosystems are recovering on large areas of former farmland. Our results illustrate the potential of socio-economic disturbances to revert land use intensification and the important role institutions and policies play in determining land use systems' resilience against such socio-economic disturbances.

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

“…This area has been closed since 1986 after the occurrence of the Chernobyl disaster, which is one of the major anthropogenic disasters of the last century. Within the Chernobyl zone, active vegetation growth and environmental recovery are observed and documented [4], which is also reflected in the results of the trend analysis. The observed positive trends in forest cover 32% of its area.…”

“…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.…”

“…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. …”

Recent land-use/land-cover change in the Central California Valley

“…LULC composition and change has already been linked to water quality declines (Foley et al, 2005), climate change at regional and global scales (Bonan, 1997, Lawrence & Chase, 2010Pielke et al, 1999Pielke et al, , 2002Pitman et al, 2011), carbon dioxide emissions (Houghton & Hackler, 2001), habitat loss (Seabloom, Dobson, & Stoms, 2002;Soule, 2001), species extinction (Davies et al, 2006), and declining air quality (Romero, Ihl, Rivera, Zalazar, & Azocar, 1999;Ross et al, 2006 between policy decisions, regulatory actions, and land use (Hostert et al, 2011;Lunetta, Knight, Ediriwickrema, Lyon, & Worthy, 2006). Continuous LULCC monitoring allows researchers to draw connections between land change and variables such as carbon storage, watershed protection, and other ecosystem services -information essential for the management of natural and anthropogenic resources.…”

Detection of Land Use Changes in Northeastern Iran by Landsat Satellite Data

“…migration, population growth etc.) (Geri et al, 2010), leading to illegal resource use (Kuemmerle et al, 2009), and expanse bare land (Hostert et al, 2011;Pongratz et al, 2011).…”