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Monitoring agricultural land abandonment in Eastern Europe with multitemporal MODIS data products Alexander V. Prishchepov, Pedro C. Alcantara, and Volker C. Radeloff Since 1991, Eastern Europe experienced significant agricultural land abandonment due to socio-economic, ecologic and political changes after the breakdown of the USSR. According to the Minister of agriculture of Russian Federation about 20 million hectares out of 140 million hectares of arable land have been abandoned in Russia alone. Our goal was to identify where agricultural land abandonment occurs, so that this process can be related to environmental and scocioeconomic conditions. We used MODIS data products to map agricultural land abandonment and forest regrowth across Eastern Europe up to the Ural Mountains. Time-series of the land cover and land cover dynamics product (MOD12) was used to mask out areas in continuous forest, water, or urban land cover. On the remaining areas, we used the surface reflectance product (MOD09) time series data for a spectral mixture analysis that identified areas that are annually still being plowed as a sign of continuing agricultural activity. Vegetation indexes were used to separate grasslands (early senescence) for shrublands (later senescence). Our results show that agricultural land abandonment is widespread. Patterns of abandonment highlight both environmental gradients (i.e., more abandonment in northern latitudes), as well as marked differences among countries, which likely reflect different socioeconomic conditions. |