Long-term agricultural land-cover change and potential for cropland expansion in the former Virgin Lands area of Kazakhstan

作者：Roland Kraemer, Alexander V. Prishchepov, Daniel Müller, Tobias Kuemmerle, Volker C. Radeloff, Andrey Dara, Alexey Terekhov, Manfred Frühauf · 发表于：Environmental Research Letters · 年份：2015 · DOI：10.1088/1748-9326/10/5/054012 · 被引用次数：182 · 研究领域：Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology、Soil and Environmental Studies

During the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign, approximately 23 million hectares (Mha) of Eurasian steppe grassland were converted into cropland in Northern Kazakhstan from 1954 to 1963. As a result Kazakhstan became an important breadbasket of the former Soviet Union. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered widespread agricultural abandonment, and much cropland reverted to grasslands. Our goal in this study was to reconstruct and analyze agricultural land-cover change since the eve of the Virgin Lands Campaign, from 1953 to 2010 in Kostanay Province, a region that is representative of Northern Kazakhstan. Further, we assessed the potential of currently idle cropland for re-cultivation. We reconstructed the cropland extent before and after the Virgin Lands Campaign using archival maps, and we mapped the agricultural land cover in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period using multi-seasonal Landsat TM/ETM+ images from circa 1990, 2000 and 2010. Cropland extent peaked at approximately 3.1 Mha in our study area in 1990, 38% of which had been converted from grasslands from 1954 to 1961. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, 45% of the Soviet cropland was abandoned and had reverted to grassland by 2000. After 2000, cropland contraction and re-cultivation were balanced. Using spatial logistic regressions we found that cropland expansion during the Virgin Lands Campaign was significantly associated with favorable agro-environmental conditions. In contrast, cropland ex...