Eastern Europe has experienced drastic changes in political and economic conditions following the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, these changes often differ among neighboring countries. This offers unique possibilities to assess the relative importance of broadscale political and socioeconomic factors on land cover and landscape pattern. Our question was how much land cover differed in the Polish, the Slovak, and the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains and to what extent these differences can be related to dissimilarities in societal, economic, and political conditions. We used a hybrid classification technique, combining advantages from supervised and unsupervised methods, to derive a land cover map from three Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) images from 2000. Results showed marked differences in land cover between the three countries. Forest cover and composition was different for the three countries, for example Slovakia and Poland had about 20% more forest cover at higher elevations than Ukraine. Broadleaved forest dominated in Slovakia while high percentages of conifers were found in Poland and Ukraine. Agriculture was most abundant in Slovakia where the lowest level of agricultural fragmentation was found (22% core area compared to less than 5% in Poland and Ukraine). Post-socialist land change was greatest in Ukraine, were we found high agricultural fragmentation and widespread early-successional shrublands indicating extensive land abandonment. Concerning forests, differences can largely be explained by socialist forest management. The abundance and pattern of arable land and grassland can be explained by two factors: land tenure in socialist times and economic transition since 1990. These results suggest that broad-scale socioeconomic and political factors are of major significance for land cover patterns in Eastern Europe, and possibly elsewhere.
File: kuemmerle_etal_2006_RSE.pdf
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Insect defoliation is a key disturbance in many forested ecosystems. Defoliation monitoring is important for both forest managers and scientists. We used 3 Landsat TM images to monitor jack pine budworm (Choristoneura pinus pinus) defoliation in a 450,000 ha study area in northwestern Wisconsin during a recent outbreak (1990-1995). The images were atmospherically corrected and spectral mixture analysis was employed using spectrometer measurements as endmembers. Heavily defoliated stands echibited a 5% increase in TM4 reflectance. This increase was smaller than the pre-outbreak range of jack pine TM4 reflectance caused by hardwood mixtures (1987: 17-28%). Hardwood content was negatively correlated with budworm populations (r = -0.69) and might be useful to predict future population levels. Defoliation could be identified using spectral mixture analysis. The green needle fraction at the peak of the outbreak was negatively correlated with budworm populations (r = -0.94). Spectral mixture analysis allowed reliable jack pine budworm defoliation mapping using Landsat TM imagery and may be applicable in other forested ecosystems as well.
File: Radeloff_etal_RemSensEnv99.pdf
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The concurrent discussions of landscape scale restora- tion among restoration ecologists, and of historic dis- turbance pattern as a guideline for forest management among forest scientists, offer a unique opportunity for collaboration between these traditionally separated fields. The objective of this study was to review the environmental history, early restoration projects, and current plans to restore landscape patterns at broader scales in the 450,000 ha northwest Wisconsin Pine Bar- rens. The Pine Barrens offer an example of a land- scape shaped by fire in the past. In northwestern Wis- consin historically the barrens were a mosaic of open prairie, savanna, and pine forests on very poor, sandy soils. The surrounding region of better soils was oth- erwise heavily forested. Six restoration sites have been managed since the middle of this century using prescribed burns to maintain the open, barrens habi- tat. However, these sites are not extensive enough to mimic the shifting mosaic of large open patches previ- ously created by fire. Extensive clear-cuts may be used as a substitute for these large fire patches so that pre- settlement landscape patterns are more closely ap- proximated in the current landscape. We suggest that such silvicultural treatments can be suitable to restore certain aspects of presettlement landscapes, such as landscape pattern and open habitat for species such as grassland birds. We are aware that the effects of fire and clear-cuts differ in many aspects and additional management tools, such as prescribed burning after harvesting, may assist in further approximating the effect of natural disturbance. However, the restoration of landscape pattern using clear-cuts may provide an important context for smaller isolated restoration sites even without the subsequent application of fire, in this formerly more open landscape.
File: Radeloff_etal_RestEco2000.pdf
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The Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the USDA Forest Service alters plot locations before releasing data to the public to ensure landowner confidentiality and sample integrity, but using data with altered plot locations in conjunction with other spatially explicit data layers produces analytical results with unknown amounts of error. We calculated the potential error from using altered location data in combination with other data layers that varied in mean map unit size. The incidence of errors associated with the use of altered plot locations exhibited a strong inverse relationship to the mean map unit size of the other data sets used in the analyses. For a 30 m x 30 m resolution land cover map, plot misclassification rates ranged from 32% to 66%, whereas only 1%-10% of plots were misclassified for ecological subsection data (mean polygon size 9067 km2). Housing density data derived from the US Decennial Census (mean polygon size = 5.7 km2) represented an intermediate condition, with 5%-70% of data points misclassified when altered plot locations were used. These analyses demonstrate the impacts of altering FIA plot locations and represent an important step toward making the FIA database more helpful to a broad variety of end users
File: Sabor_etal_CJFR_2007.pdf
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The US Census provides the primary source of spatially explicit social data, but changing block boundaries complicate analyses of housing growth over time. We compared procedures for reconciling housing density data between 1990 and 2000 census block boundaries in order to assess the sensitivity of analytical methods to estimates of housing growth in Oregon. Estimates of housing growth varied substantially and were sensitive to the method of interpolation. With no processing and areal-weighted interpolation, more than 35% of the landscape changed; 75-80% of this change was due to decline in housing density. This decline was implausible, however, because housing structures generally persist over time. Based on aggregated boundaries, 11% of the landscape changed, but only 4% experienced a decline in housing density. Nevertheless, the housing density change map was almost twice as coarse spatially as the 2000 housing density data. We also applied a dasymetric approach to redistribute 1990 housing data into 2000 census boundaries under the assumption that the distribution of housing in 2000 reflected the same distribution as in 1990. The dasymetric approach resulted in conservative change estimates at a fine resolution. All methods involved some type of trade-off (e.g. analytical difficulty, data resolution, magnitude or bias in direction of change). However, our dasymetric procedure is a novel approach for assessing housing growth over changing census boundaries that may be particularly useful because it accounts for the uniquely persistent nature of housing over time.
File: nrs_2009_syphard_001.pdf
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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 intensi?cation and the important role institutions and policies play in determining land use systems' resilience against such socio-economic disturbances.
File: Hostert-et-al_Chernobyl_ERL_2011.pdf
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Land use is a critical factor in the global carbon cycle, but land-use effects on carbon fluxes are poorly understood in many regions. One such region is Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where land-use intensity decreased substantially after the collapse of socialism, and farmland abandonment and forest expansion have been widespread. Our goal was to examine how land-use trends affected net carbon ?uxes in western Ukraine (57 000 km2) and to assess the region's future carbon sequestration potential. Using satellite-based forest disturbance and farmland abandon- ment rates from 1988 to 2007, historic forest resource statistics, and a carbon bookkeeping model, we reconstructed carbon ?uxes from land use in the 20th century and assessed potential future carbon ?uxes until 2100 for a range of forest expansion and logging scenarios. Our results suggested that the low-point in forest cover occurred in the 1920s. Forest expansion between 1930 and 1970 turned the region from a carbon source to a sink, despite intensive logging during socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union created a vast, but currently largely untapped carbon sequestration potential (up to = 150 Tg C in our study region). Future forest expansion will likely maintain or even increase the region's current sink strength of 1.48 Tg C yr-1. This may offer substantial opportunities for offsetting industrial carbon emissions and for rural development in regions with otherwise diminishing income opportunities. Through- out Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, millions of hectares of farmland were abandoned after the collapse of socialism; thus similar reforestation opportunities may exist in other parts of this region.
File: Kuemmerle-etal_2011_Farmland-abandonment-carbon-sequestration-Ukraine_0.pdf
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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the forestry sector in Russia underwent substantial changes: the state forestry sector was decentralized, the timber industry was privatized, and timber use rights were allocated through short- and long-term leases. To date, there has been no quantitative assessment of the drivers of timber harvesting in European Russia following these changes. In this paper we estimate an econometric model of timber harvesting using remote sensing estimations of forest disturbance from 1990-2000 to 2000-2005 as our dependent variable. We aggregate forest disturbance to administrative districts - equivalent to counties in the United States - and test the impact of several biophysical and economic factors on timber harvesting. Additionally, we examine the impact that regions - equivalent to states in the United States and the main level of decentralized governance in Russia - have on timber harvesting by estimating the influence of regional-level effects on forest disturbance in our econometric model. Russian regions diverged considerably in political and economic conditions after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the question is if these variations impacted timber harvesting after controlling for district-level biophysical and economic drivers. We find that the most important drivers of timber harvesting at the district level are road density, the percent of evergreen forest, and the total area of forest. The influence of these variables on timber harvesting changed over time and there was more harvesting closer to urban areas in 2000-2005. Even though district-level variables explain more than 70 percent of the variation in forest disturbance in our econometric model, we find that regional-level effects remain statistically significant. While we cannot identify the exact mechanism through which regional-level effects impact timber harvesting, our results suggest that sub-national differences can have a large and statistically significant impact on land-use outcomes and should be considered in policy design and evaluation.
File: Wendland_etal2011_driversoftimberharvesting_GEC.pdf
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Farmland abandonment restructures rural landscapes in many regions worldwide in response to gradual industrialization and urbanization. In contrast, the political breakdown in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union triggered rapid and widespread farmland abandonment, but the spatial patterns of abandonment and its drivers are not well understood. Our goal was to map post-Socialist farmland abandonment in Western Ukraine using Landsat images from 1986 to 2008, and to identify spatial determinants of abandonment using a combination of best-subsets linear regression models and hierarchical partitioning. Our results suggest that farmland abandonment was widespread in the study region, with abandonment rates of up to 56%. In total, 6600 km 2 (30%) of the farmland used during socialism was abandoned after 1991. Topography, soil type, and population variables were the most important predictors to explain substantial spatial variation in abandonment rates. However, many of our a priori hypotheses about the direction of variable in?uence were rejected. Most importantly, abandonment rates were higher in the plains and lower in marginal areas. The growing importance of subsistence farming in the transition period, as well as off-farm income and remittances likely explain these patterns. The breakdown of socialism appears to have resulted in fundamentally different abandonment patterns in the Western Ukraine, where abandonment was a result of the institutional and economic shock, compared to those in Europe's West, where abandonment resulted from long-term socio-economic transformation such as urbanization and industrialization.
File: baumann-etal_2011_Patterns-drivers-abandonment-Ukraine.pdf
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Fire is an important natural disturbance process in arid grasslands but current fire regimes are largely the result of both human and natural processes and their interactions. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 spurred substantial socioeconomic changes and was ultimately followed by a rapid increase in burned area in southern Russia. What is unclear is whether this increase in burned area was caused by decreasing livestock numbers, vegetation changes, climate change, or interactions of these factors. Our research goal was to identify the driving forces behind the increase in burned area in the arid grasslands of southern Russia. Our study area encompassed 19,000 km2 in the Republic of Kalmykia in southern Russia. We analyzed annual burned area from 1986 to 2006 as a function of livestock population, NDVI, precipitation, temperature, and broad-scale oscillation indices using best subset regressions and structural equation modeling. Our results supported the hypothesis that vegetation recovered within 5-6 years after the livestock declined in the beginning of the 1990s, to a point at which large fires could be sustained. Climate was an important explanatory factor for burning, but mainly after 1996 when lower livestock numbers allowed fuels to accumulate. Ultimately, our results highlight the complexity of coupled human-natural systems, and provide an example of how abrupt socioeconomic change may affect fire regimes.
File: dubininetal.pdf
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