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Underlying Drivers and Spatial Determinants of post-Soviet Agricultural Land Abandonment in Temperate Eastern Europe

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Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes in Eastern Europe after the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Abstract

Our goal was to understand the underlying drivers and spatial determinants of agricultural land abandonment following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent transition from state-command to market-driven economies from 1990 to 2000. We brought an example of agricultural land-use change in one agro-climatic zone stretching across Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. Here, we provide an overview of the agricultural changes for the studied countries. We estimated the rates and patterns of agricultural land abandonment based on Landsat TM/ETM+ satellite images and linked these data with institutional changes regarding land use. Using spatially explicit logistic regressions, we assessed spatial determinants of agricultural land abandonment. The highest rates of land abandonment from 1990 to 2000 were observed in Russia (31 %), followed by Lithuania (19 %), and Belarus (13 %), and the differences in land abandonment rates reflected the contrasting strategies for transitioning toward a market economy. The spatial patterns of agricultural land abandonment across Lithuania and Russia corresponded to the land rent theory of von Thünen , as sites with low crop yields that were distant from markets had higher rates of abandonment. However, this was not the case for Belarus, where the institutional environment regarding agricultural land use differed from neighboring Lithuania and Russia.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge support for this research by the NASA Land Cover and Land Use Change program (NASA NNX13AC66G), the German Science Foundation (DFG, project LUCC-BIO-1), the European Commission (projects VOLANTE and HERCULES), the GERUKA project funded by the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMLE) and EPIKUR (Leibniz Foundation).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Øster Voldgade 10, 1350, København K, Denmark

    Alexander V. Prishchepov

  2. Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Theodor-Lieser str. 2, Halle (Saale), 06120, Germany

    Alexander V. Prishchepov & Daniel Müller

  3. Geography Department, Humboldt-University Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099, Berlin, Germany

    Daniel Müller, Matthias Baumann & Tobias Kuemmerle

  4. Departamento de Ecología y Recursos Naturales, Centro Universitario de la Costa Sur, Universidad de Guadalajara, Avenida Independencia Nacional 151, 48900, Autlan de Navarro, Jalisco, Mexico

    Camilo Alcantara

  5. Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Volker C. Radeloff

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  1. Alexander V. Prishchepov
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  2. Daniel Müller
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  3. Matthias Baumann
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  6. Volker C. Radeloff
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Correspondence to Alexander V. Prishchepov .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Headquarters, Washington, District of Columbia, USA

    Garik Gutman

  2. Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

    Volker Radeloff

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Prishchepov, A.V., Müller, D., Baumann, M., Kuemmerle, T., Alcantara, C., Radeloff, V.C. (2017). Underlying Drivers and Spatial Determinants of post-Soviet Agricultural Land Abandonment in Temperate Eastern Europe. In: Gutman, G., Radeloff, V. (eds) Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes in Eastern Europe after the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42638-9_5

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