Abstract
This chapter presents an analysis of land cover changes in Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2006, assessed using CORINE (Co-ORdination of INformation on the Environment) Land Cover (CLC) datasets. The plethora of potential land cover change categories were condensed into seven categories of major land use change processes: urbanization, agricultural intensification, agricultural extensification, afforestation, deforestation, construction and management of water bodies, and other changes. The amounts of each change category and their spatial distributions are summarized, and the change categories were also mapped to show the relative amounts of change (per 3 × 3 km2) between 1990 and 2000 and between 2000 and 2006. The results showed that while more afforestation than deforestation was observed in the first period, the reverse was true in the second period, when deforestation outpaced afforestation. Urbanization and suburbanization were major processes in Eastern Europe, particularly around existing major cities, and the speed of this process generally increased from the first to the second period. Both the intensification and extensification of agriculture were common during both periods, but a larger effect was observed in the first period. Overall, land use changes were highest in central Europe and the Baltic countries and lowest in southeast Europe.
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Acknowledgments
This paper is one output of the project VEGA Grant Agency No 2/0006/13, Changes of cultural landscape: analysis of extension of urban fabric and farmland abandonment processes applying land cover databases, “pursued at the Institute of Geography of the Slovak Academy of Sciences” and “The Historical Geography Research Centre”, Excellence grant project of Czech Science Foundation, GACR P410/12/G113.” We also want to thank Hana Contrerasova for thorough reading of this paper in English.
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Feranec, J., Soukup, T., Taff, G.N., Stych, P., Bicik, I. (2017). Overview of Changes in Land Use and Land Cover in 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_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42638-9_2
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