Increasing crop production in Russia and Ukraine—regional and global impacts from intensification and recultivation

Russia and Ukraine are countries with relatively large untapped agricultural potentials, both in terms of abandoned agricultural land and substantial yield gaps. Here we present a comprehensive assessment of Russian and Ukrainian crop production potentials and we analyze possible impacts of their future utilization, on a regional as well as global scale. To this end, the total amount of available abandoned land and potential yields in Russia and Ukraine are estimated and explicitly implemented in an economic agricultural sector model. We find that cereal (barley, corn, and wheat) production in Russia and Ukraine could increase by up to 64% in 2030 to 267 million tons, compared to a baseline scenario. Oilseeds (rapeseed, soybean, and sunflower) production could increase by 84% to 50 million tons, respectively. In comparison to the baseline, common net exports of Ukraine and Russia could increase by up to 86.3 million tons of cereals and 18.9 million tons of oilseeds in 2030, representing 4% and 3.6% of the global production of these crops, respectively. Furthermore, we find that production potentials due to intensification are ten times larger than potentials due to recultivation of abandoned land. Consequently, we also find stronger impacts from intensification at the global scale. A utilization of crop production potentials in Russia and Ukraine could globally save up to 21 million hectares of cropland and reduce average global crop prices by more than 3%

Mapping Cropland Abandonment in the Aral Sea Basin with MODIS Time Series

Cropland abandonment is globally widespread and has strong repercussions for regional food security and the environment. Statistics suggest that one of the hotspots of abandoned cropland is located in the drylands of the Aral Sea Basin (ASB), which covers parts of post-Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran. To date, the exact spatial and temporal extents of abandoned cropland remain unclear, which hampers land-use planning. Abandoned land is a potentially valuable resource for alternative land uses. Here, we mapped the abandoned cropland in the drylands of the ASB with a time series of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) from 2003–2016. To overcome the restricted ability of a single classifier to accurately map land-use classes across large areas and agro-environmental gradients, “stratum-specific” classifiers were calibrated and classification results were fused based on a locally weighted decision fusion approach. Next, the agro-ecological suitability of abandoned cropland areas was evaluated. The stratum-specific classification approach yielded an overall accuracy of 0.879, which was significantly more accurate ( p < 0.05) than a “global” classification without stratification, which had an accuracy of 0.811. In 2016, the classification results showed that 13% (1.15 Mha) of the observed irrigated cropland in the ASB was idle (abandoned). Cropland abandonment occurred mostly in the Amudarya and Syrdarya downstream regions and was associated with degraded land and areas prone to water stress. Despite the almost twofold population growth and increasing food demand in the ASB area from 1990 to 2016, abandoned cropland was also located in areas with high suitability for farming. The map of abandoned cropland areas provides a novel basis for assessing the causes leading to abandoned cropland in the ASB. This contributes to assessing the suitability of abandoned cropland for food or bioenergy production, carbon storage, or assessing the environmental trade-offs and social constraints of recultivation

How conflict affects land use: Agricultural activity in areas seized by the Islamic State

© 2017 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd.Socio-economic shocks, technogenic catastrophes, and armed conflicts often have drastic impacts on local and regional food security through disruption of agricultural production and food trade, reduced investments, and deterioration of land and infrastructure. Recently, more research has focused on the effects of armed conflict on land systems, but still little is known about the processes and outcomes of such events. Here we use the case of Syria and Iraq and the seizure of land by the Islamic State (IS) since 2014 as an example of armed conflict, where we investigate the effects on agricultural land use. We apply a reproducible approach using 250 m satellite-based time-series data to quantify the areas under cultivation from 2000 to 2015. Despite a common belief about widespread land abandonment in areas under conflict, results point to multiple trajectories regarding cropland cultivation in the IS seized area: (1) expansion of cropland to formerly un-cultivated areas, (2) cropland abandonment, and (3) decrease of high-intensity cropland. Our study highlights the need to understand these diverse conflict-related and context-dependent changes to the land system

Production potential in the "bread baskets" of Eastern Europe and Central Asia

© 2017 Elsevier B.V.Eastern Europe and Central Asia is a major food producer and exporter. Almost a quarter of world wheat exports come from the region, and especially from Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine (RUK). The potential of these countries to become a "bread basket" for the world has been emphasized because of already large production and exports and their "immense land and yield reserves", referring to the abandonment of more than 50 million hectares of cropland and the large drop in crop productivity in the 1990s. However, there is considerable uncertainty about the potential of this land for food production. In this paper we review interdisciplinary literature and empirical evidence, predictions of production potential and impacts of climate change; and discuss the potential of the region to become a reliable breadbasket of the world. From a biophysical (crop growth) perspective, under different scenarios of increased yields, land use and climate change effects, RUK could produce an additional 40-110 million tons of wheat compared to current production, which would be a substantial additional production. However economic incentives, in particular the evolution of food prices and competition from other crops, are likely to significantly constrain these potentials. In addition, the introduction of export restrictions during recent times of high prices raised concerns on the reliability of RUK as exporters

Spatial variation in determinants of agricultural land abandonment in Europe

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. Agricultural abandonment is widespread and growing in many regions worldwide, often because of agricultural intensification on productive lands, conservation policies, or the spatial decoupling of agricultural production from consumption. Abandonment has major environmental and social impacts, which differ starkly depending on the geographical context, as does its potential to serve as a land reservoir for recultivation. Understanding determinants of abandonment patterns, and especially how their influence varies across broad geographic extents, is therefore important. Using a pan-European map of agricultural abandonment derived from MODIS NDVI time series between 2001 and 2012, we quantified the importance of farm management, climatic, environmental, and socio-economic variables in explaining abandonment patterns. We chose a machine learning modelling framework that accounts for spatial variation in the relationship between abandonment and its determinants. We predicted abandonment probability as well as determinant coefficients for the entire study area and summarised them for regions under selected EU support schemes. Our results highlight that agricultural abandonment was mainly explained by climate conditions suboptimal for agriculture (i.e., low/high growing degrees days). Determinants related to farm management (smaller field size, lower yields) and socio-economic conditions (high unemployment, negative migration balance) also contributed to describing agricultural abandonment patterns in Europe. Several determinants influenced abandonment in strongly non-linear ways and we found substantial spatial non-stationarity effects, although abandonment patterns were equally well-explained by predictors specified with spatially constant and varying effects. Predicted abandonment probability was similar inside and outside EU support or conservation zones, whereas observed MODIS-based abandonment was generally higher outside these zones, suggesting that schemes such as Natura 2000 or High Nature Value Farmland likely influence abandonment patterns. Our work highlights the potential value of spatial boosting for gaining insights into land-use change processes and their outcomes, which should increase the ability of such models to inform context-specific, regionalised decision making

Report on the IDRC 2012 Canadian Learning Forum : Virtual Platforms, Knowledge Management and International Development, February 7-8, 2012, Winnipeg

French version available in IDRC Digital Library: Rapport sur le Forum canadien d'apprentissage du CRDI 2012 : plateformes virtuelles, gestion des connaissances et développement international, Winnipeg, les 7 et 8 février 2012Over the past five years, the Canadian Partnerships (CP) program at IDRC has supported a number of Canadian academic, research and civil society organizations to use online virtual platforms (VPs) in their research, policy development, project collaboration, capacity building and dissemination activities. VPs are online tools and systems that are designed to facilitate knowledge sharing, management and collaboration amongst geographically dispersed actors. International development organizations increasingly see these VPs as a means to connecting far-flung staff, partners, participants and supporters to document, compile and make sense of their collective learning to enhance real-world, “off-line results”. Moreover, for organizations that work globally, VPs also offer the advantage of reducing the costs, inconvenience and pollution associated with international travel; and as more and more people in the global South are connecting to the Internet via mobile phones, the potential to reach new constituencies and to support collaboration between local, national and international actors is exciting, but also potentially overwhelming for staff charged with starting up and facilitating the use of these platforms..

Production potential in the “bread baskets” of Eastern Europe and Central Asia

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Eastern Europe and Central Asia is a major food producer and exporter. Almost a quarter of world wheat exports come from the region, and especially from Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine (RUK). The potential of these countries to become a “bread basket” for the world has been emphasized because of already large production and exports and their “immense land and yield reserves”, referring to the abandonment of more than 50 million hectares of cropland and the large drop in crop productivity in the 1990s. However, there is considerable uncertainty about the potential of this land for food production. In this paper we review interdisciplinary literature and empirical evidence, predictions of production potential and impacts of climate change; and discuss the potential of the region to become a reliable breadbasket of the world. From a biophysical (crop growth) perspective, under different scenarios of increased yields, land use and climate change effects, RUK could produce an additional 40–110 million tons of wheat compared to current production, which would be a substantial additional production. However economic incentives, in particular the evolution of food prices and competition from other crops, are likely to significantly constrain these potentials. In addition, the introduction of export restrictions during recent times of high prices raised concerns on the reliability of RUK as exporters

Large greenhouse gas savings due to changes in the post-Soviet food systems

As the global food system contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, understanding the sources of GHG emissions embodied in different components of food systems is important. The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a massive restructuring of the domestic food systems, namely declining consumption of animal products, cropland abandonment, and a major restructuring of agricultural trade. However, how these complex changes have affected global GHG emissions is uncertain. Here, we quantified the net GHG emissions associated with changes in the former Soviet Union's food systems. Changes in food production, consumption, and trade together resulted in a net emissions reduction of 7.61 Gt carbon dioxide equivalents from 1992 to 2011. For comparison, this corresponds to one quarter of the CO2 emissions from deforestation in Latin America from 1991 to 2011. The key drivers of the emissions reductions were the decreasing beef consumption in the 1990s, increasing beef imports after 2000, mainly from South America, and carbon sequestration in soils on abandoned cropland. Ongoing transformations of the food systems in the former Soviet Union, however, suggest emissions will likely rebound. The results highlight the importance of considering agricultural production, land-use change, trade, and consumption when assessing countries emissions portfolios. Moreover, we demonstrated how emissions reductions that originate from a reduction in the extent and intensity of agricultural production can be compromised by increasing emissions embodied in rising imports of agricultural commodities.Volkswagen Foundation (BALTRAK)the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL) (GERUKA)The Swedish Research Council FormasThe Russian Foundation for Basic ResearchRussian Government Program of Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal UniversityEuropean Research Council (ERC)Peer Reviewe

Mapping agricultural land abandonment from spatial and temporal segmentation of Landsat time series

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. Agricultural land abandonment is a common land-use change, making the accurate mapping of both location and timing when agricultural land abandonment occurred important to understand its environmental and social outcomes. However, it is challenging to distinguish agricultural abandonment from transitional classes such as fallow land at high spatial resolutions due to the complexity of change process. To date, no robust approach exists to detect when agricultural land abandonment occurred based on 30-m Landsat images. Our goal here was to develop a new approach to detect the extent and the exact timing of agricultural land abandonment using spatial and temporal segments derived from Landsat time series. We tested our approach for one Landsat footprint in the Caucasus, covering parts of Russia and Georgia, where agricultural land abandonment is widespread. First, we generated agricultural land image objects from multi-date Landsat imagery using a multi-resolution segmentation approach. Second, we estimated the probability for each object that agricultural land was used each year based on Landsat temporal-spectral metrics and a random forest model. Third, we applied temporal segmentation of the resulting agricultural land probability time series to identify change classes and detect when abandonment occurred. We found that our approach was able to accurately separate agricultural abandonment from active agricultural lands, fallow land, and re-cultivation. Our spatial and temporal segmentation approach captured the changes at the object level well (overall mapping accuracy = 97 ± 1%), and performed substantially better than pixel-level change detection (overall accuracy = 82 ± 3%). We found strong spatial and temporal variations in agricultural land abandonment rates in our study area, likely a consequence of regional wars after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In summary, the combination of spatial and temporal segmentation approaches of time-series is a robust method to track agricultural land abandonment and may be relevant for other land-use changes as well