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

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Abstract

The increase in the speed of land-cover change experienced worldwide is becoming a growing concern. Major socio-economic transitions, such as the breakdown of socialism in Europe, may lead to particularly high rates of landscape transformations. In this paper we examined the loss of semi-natural grasslands in Hungary between 1987 and 1999. We studied the relationship between 9 potential driving forces and the fate of grasslands using logistic GLMs. Grassland loss was found to be very high (1.31 % per year), which is far higher than either before or after this period. The most influential predictors of grassland loss were environmental and landscape characteristics (soil type, area of remnant grassland patches), and the socio-economic context (distance to paved road, and nearest settlement, human population density). Several processes and relationships can only be understood from a historical perspective (e.g. large extent of afforestation, strong decrease of soil water table). Grassland loss during the study period emerged as a consequence of survival strategies of individual farmers seeking adaptation to the changing environmental and socio-economic conditions, and not urbanization and agricultural intensification which are the main underlying drivers for the ongoing landscape transformations in most parts of the developed world. Though globalization increasingly influences local land use decisions, reconstructing and modelling recent landscape changes cannot be done without a proper understanding of local history and culture. Our analysis shows the importance of large-area yet high resolution landscape change research, which may reveal unexpected patterns of land cover change, undetected at coarser scales.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our thanks to Jenő Zsolt Farkas, András Iványosi Szabó, and Zoltán Vajda for their help in gathering adequate data for our analysis, to the two editors, and the two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions, and Edwin Divall for English revision.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Ecology and Botany, Centre for Ecological Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Alkotmány u. 2-4, 2163, Vácrátót, Hungary

    Marianna Biró, Bálint Czúcz, Ferenc Horváth & Zsolt Molnár

  2. Calderdale MBC, Northgate House, Northgate, Halifax, HX1 1UN, UK

    András Révész

  3. Alföld Institute, Centre for Regional Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Rákóczi út 3, 6000, Kecskemét, Hungary

    Bálint Csatári

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  1. Marianna Biró
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  2. Bálint Czúcz
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  4. András Révész
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  5. Bálint Csatári
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  6. Zsolt Molnár
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Correspondence to Zsolt Molnár.

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10980_2012_9818_MOESM1_ESM.txt

Electronic appendix: ANOVA tables containing AIC, χ2 and p-values for single term additions and single term deletions, as well as the coefficients for each term in the best model for each type of grassland loss (TXT 12 kb)

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Biró, M., Czúcz, B., Horváth, F. et al. Drivers of grassland loss in Hungary during the post-socialist transformation (1987–1999). Landscape Ecol 28, 789–803 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-012-9818-0

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