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Widespread changes of agricultural land use occurred in Eastern Europe since the collapse of socialism and the European Union’s eastward expansion, but the rates and patterns of recent land changes remain unclear. Here we assess agricultural land change for the entire Carpathian ecoregion in Eastern Europe at 30 m spatial resolution with Landsat data and for two change periods, between 1985–2000 and 2000–2010. The early period is characterized by post-socialist transition processes, the late period by an increasing influence of EU politics in the region. For mapping and change detection, we use a machine learning approach (random forests) on image composites and variance metrics which were derived from the full decadal archive of Landsat imagery. Our results suggest that cropland abandonment was the most prevalent change process, but we also detected considerable areas of grassland conversion and forest expansion on non-forest land. Cropland abandonment was most extensive during the transition period and predominantly occurred in marginal areas with low suitability for agriculture. Conversely, we observed substantial recultivation of formerly abandoned cropland in high-value agricultural areas since 2000. Hence, market forces increasingly adjust socialist legacies of land expansive production and agricultural land use clusters in favorable areas while marginal lands revert to forest.

The demand for agricultural products continues to grow rapidly, but further agricultural expansion entails substantial environmental costs, making recultivating currently unused farmland an interesting alternative. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to widespread abandonment of agricultural lands, but the extent and spatial patterns of abandonment are unclear. We quantified the extent of abandoned farmland, both croplands and pastures, across the region using MODIS NDVI satellite image time series from 2004 to 2006 and support vector machine classifications. Abandoned farmland was widespread, totaling 52.5 Mha, particularly in temperate European Russia (32 Mha), northern and western Ukraine, and Belarus. Differences in abandonment rates among countries were striking, suggesting that institutional and socio-economic factors were more important in determining the amount of abandonment than biophysical conditions. Indeed, much abandoned farmland occurred in areas without major constraints for agriculture. Our map provides a basis for assessing the potential of Central and Eastern Europe’s abandoned agricultural lands to contribute to food or bioenergy production, or carbon storage, as well as the environmental trade-offs and social constraints of recultivation.

When characterizing the processes that shape ecosystems, ecologists increasingly use the unique perspective offered by repeat observations of remotely sensed imagery. However, the concept of change embodied in much of the traditional remote-sensing literature was primarily limited to capturing large or extreme changes occurring in natural systems, omitting many more subtle processes of interest to ecologists. Recent technical advances have led to a fundamental shift toward an ecological view of change. Although this conceptual shift began with coarser-scale global imagery, it has now reached users of Landsat imagery, since these datasets have temporal and spatial characteristics appropriate to many ecological questions. We argue that this ecologically relevant perspective of change allows the novel characterization of important dynamic processes, including disturbances, long-term trends, cyclical functions, and feedbacks, and that these improvements are already facilitating our understanding of critical driving forces, such as climate change, ecological interactions, and economic pressures.

Spatially explicit information on cropland use intensity is vital for monitoring land and water resource demands in agricultural systems. Cropping practices underlie substantial spatial and temporal variability, which can be captured through the analysis of image time series. Temporal binning helps to overcome limitations concerning operability and repeatability for mapping large areas and can improve the thematic detail and consistency of maps in agricultural systems. We here assessed the use of annual, quarterly, and eight-day temporal features for mapping five cropping practices on annual croplands across Turkey. We used 2403 atmospherically corrected and topographically normalized Landsat Collection 1 L1TP images of 2015 to compute quarterly best-pixel composites, quarterly and annual spectral-temporal metrics, as well as gap-filled eight-day time series of Tasseled Cap components. We tested 22 feature sets for binary cropland mapping, and subsequent discrimination of five cropping practices: Spring and winter cropping, summer cropping, semi-aquatic cropping, double cropping, and greenhouse cultivation. We evaluated area-adjusted accuracies and compared cropland area estimates at the province-level with official statistics. We achieved overall accuracies above 90%, when using either all quarterly features or the eight-day Tasseled Cap time series, indicating that temporal binning of intra-annual image time-series into multiple temporal features improves representations of cropping practices. Class accuracies of winter and spring, summer, and double cropping were robust, while omission errors for semi-aquatic cropping and greenhouse cultivation were high. Our mapped cropland extent was in good agreement with province-level statistics (r2 = 0.85, RMSE = 7.2%). Our results indicate that 71.3% (±2.3%) of Turkey’s annual croplands were cultivated during winter and spring, 15.8% (±2.2%) during summer, while 8.5% (±1.6%) were double-cropped, 4% (±1.9%) were cultivated under semi-aquatic conditions, and 0.32% (±0.2%) was greenhouse cultivation. Our study presents an open and readily available framework for detailed cropland mapping over large areas, which bears the potential to inform assessments of land use intensity, as well as land and water resource demands.

Old-growth forests around the world are vanishing rapidly and have been lost almost completely from the European temperate forest region. Poor management practices, often triggered by socioeconomic and institutional change, are the main causes of loss. Recent trends in old-growth forest cover in Romania, where some of the last remaining tracts of these forests within Europe are located, are revealed by satellite image analysis. Forest cover declined by 1.3 % from 2000 to 2010. Romania's protected area network has been expanded substantially since the country's accession to the European Union in 2007, and most of the remaining old-growth forests now are located within protected areas. Surprisingly though, 72% of the old-growth forest disturbances are found within protected areas, highlighting the threats still facing these forests. It appears that logging in old-growth forests is, at least in part, related to institutional reforms, insufficient protection and ownership changes since the collapse of communism in 1989. The majority of harvesting activities in old-growth forest areas are in accordance with the law. Without improvements to their governance, the future of Romania's old-growth forests and the important ecosystem services they provide remains uncertain.

The unprecedented and continuously growing volume of Earth Observation (EO) and geospatial data has necessitated a paradigm change where compute is collocated with the data archives in public clouds. However, as no single cloud platform can host all of this data, federated processing solutions that work across multiple cloud platforms are becoming increasingly relevant. A community-based approach to federated processing has started using openEO, a common Application Programming Interface (API) and set of well-defined processes that simplifies reuse and provides a valuable level of abstraction when handling large EO data volumes. We present key concepts for federated processing and related interoperability aspects based on openEO Platform , a federated public cloud platform.

The global demand for agricultural products is surging due to population growth, more meat-based diets, and the increasing role of bioenergy. Three strategies can increase agricultural production: (1) expanding agriculture into natural ecosystems; (2) intensifying existing farmland; or (3) recultivating abandoned farmland. Because agricultural expansion entails substantial environmental trade-offs, intensification and recultivation are currently gaining increasing attention. Assessing where these strategies may be pursued, however, requires improved spatial information on land use intensity, including where farmland is active and fallow. We developed a framework to integrate optical and radar data in order to advance the mapping of three farmland management regimes: (1) large-scale, mechanized agriculture; (2) small-scale, subsistence agriculture; and (3) fallow or abandoned farmland. We applied this framework to our study area in western Ukraine, a region characterized by marked spatial heterogeneity in management intensity due to the legacies from Soviet land management, the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the recent integration of this region into world markets. We mapped land management regimes using a hierarchical, object-based framework. Image segmentation for delineating objects was performed by using the Superpixel Contour algorithm. We then applied Random Forest classification to map land management regimes and validated our map using randomly sampled in-situ data, obtained during an extensive field campaign. Our results showed that farmland management regimes were mapped reliably, resulting in a final map with an overall accuracy of 83.4%. Comparing our land management regimes map with a soil map revealed that most fallow land occurred on soils marginally suited for agriculture, but some areas within our study region contained considerable potential for recultivation. Overall, our study highlights the potential for an improved, more nuanced mapping of agricultural land use by combining imagery of different sensors.

The drastic socio-economic and political changes that occurred after the breakdown of socialism in Eastern Europe triggered widespread land use change, including cropland abandonment and forest cover changes. Yet the rates and spatial patterns of post-socialist land use change remain largely unclear. We used Landsat TM/ETM+ images to classify land cover maps and assess landscape pattern changes from 1990 to 2005 in Argeş County, Southern Romania. Cropland abandonment was the most widespread change (21.1% abandonment rate), likely due to declining returns from farming, tenure insecurity, and demographic developments during transition. Forest cover and forest fragmentation remained remarkably stable during transition, despite widespread ownership transfers. Cropland abandonment provides opportunities for increased carbon sequestration, but threatens cultural landscapes and biodiversity. Continued monitoring is important for assessing whether abandoned croplands will eventually reforest or be put back into production and to better understand the consequences of post-socialist land use change for ecosystems and biodiversity.

Protected areas are a cornerstone for forest protection, but they are not always effective during times of socioeconomic and institutional crises. The Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe are an ecologically outstanding region, with widespread seminatural and old-growth forest. Since 1990, Carpathian countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Ukraine) have experienced economic hardship and institutional changes, including the breakdown of socialism, European Union accession, and a rapid expansion of protected areas. The question is how protected-area effectiveness has varied during these times across the Carpathians given these changes. We analyzed a satellite-based data set of forest disturbance (i.e., forest loss due to harvesting or natural disturbances) from 1985 to 2010 and used matching statistics and a fixed-effects estimator to quantify the effect of protection on forest disturbance. Protected areas in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Ukraine had significantly less deforestation inside protected areas than outside in some periods; the likelihood of disturbance was reduced by 1-5%. The effectiveness of protection increased over time in these countries, whereas the opposite was true in Romania. Older protected areas were most effective in Romania and Hungary, but newer protected areas were more effective in Czech Republic, and Poland. Strict protection (International Union for Conservation of Nature [IUCN] protection category Ia-II) was not more effective than landscape-level protection (IUCN III-VI). We suggest that the strength of institutions, the differences in forest privatization, forest management, prior distribution of protected areas, and when countries joined the European Union may provide explanations for the strikingly heterogeneous effectiveness patterns among countries. Our results highlight how different the effects of protected areas can be at broad scales, indicating that the effectiveness of protected areas is transitory over time and space and suggesting that generalizations about the effectiveness of protected areas can be misleading. Las áreas protegidas son una piedra angular para la protección de los bosques, pero no son siempre efectivas durante los momentos de crisis socioeconómica e institucional. Las montañas de los Cárpatos en Europa Oriental son una región sobresaliente ecológicamente, con bosques semi-naturales extensos y bosques de viejo crecimiento. Desde 1990, los países de los Cárpatos (República Checa, Hungría, Polonia, Rumania, Eslovaquia y Ucrania) han experimentado dificultades económicas y cambios institucionales, incluyendo la caída del socialismo, el ascenso de la Unión Europea y una rápida expansión de las áreas protegidas. La pregunta es cómo ha variado la efectividad de las áreas protegidas durante estos momentos a través de los Cárpatos dados estos cambios. Analizamos un conjunto de datos satelitales sobre la perturbación del bosque (es decir, la pérdida de bosque a causa de la cosecha o las perturbaciones naturales) desde 1985 a 2010 y utilizamos estadístics correspondiente y un estimador de efectos fijados para cuantificar el efecto de la protección sobre la perturbación del bosque. Las áreas protegidas en la República Checa, Eslovaquia y Ucrania significativamente tuvieron menor deforestación dentro que afuera; la probabilidad de perturbación fue reducida en un 1 - 5 %. La efectividad de la protección incrementó con el tiempo en estos países, mientras que lo contrario fue cierto para Rumania. Las áreas protegidas más viejas fueron más efectivas en Rumania y Hungría, pero las más nuevas fueron más efectivas en la República Checa y Polonia. La protección estricta (categoría Ia-II de la Unión Internacional para la Conservación de la Naturaleza [UICN]) no fue más efectiva que la protección a nivel de paisaje (IUCN III-IV). Sugerimos que la fuerza de las instituciones, las diferencias en la privatización de los bosques, el manejo de los bosques, la perturbación previa de las áreas protegidas y cuando los países se unen a la Unión Europea pueden proporcionar explicaciones para los patrones impresionantemente heterogéneos de efectividad entre los países. Nuestros resultados resaltan cómo pueden ser los diferentes efectos de las áreas protegidas a escalas generales, indicando que la efectividad de las áreas protegidas es transitoria a lo largo del tiempo y el espacio, y sugiriendo que las generalizaciones sobre la efectividad de las áreas protegidas pueden ser engañosas.

Context Distribution and connectivity of suitable habitat for species of conservation concern is critical for effective conservation planning. Capercaillie ( Tetrao urogallus ), an umbrella species for biodiversity conservation, is increasingly threatened because of habitat loss and fragmentation. Objective We assessed the impact of drastic changes in forest management in the Carpathian Mountains, a major stronghold of capercaillie in Europe, on habitat distribution and connectivity. Methods We used field data surveys with a forest disturbance dataset for 1985–2010 to map habitat suitability, and we used graph theory to analyse habitat connectivity. Results Climate, topography, forest proportion and fragmentation, and the distance to roads and settlements best identified capercaillie presence. Suitable habitat area was 7510 km 2 in 1985; by 2010, clear-cutting had reduced that area by 1110 km 2 . More suitable habitat was lost inside protected areas (571 km 2 ) than outside (413 km 2 ). Habitat loss of 15 % reduced functional connectivity by 33 % since 1985. Conclusions Forest management, particularly large-scale clear-cutting and salvage logging, have substantially diminished and fragmented suitable capercaillie habitat, regardless of the status of forest protection. Consequently, larger areas with suitable habitat are now isolated and many patches are too small to sustain viable populations. Given that protection of capercaillie habitat would benefit many other species, including old-growth specialists and large carnivores, conservation actions to halt the loss of capercaillie habitat is urgently needed. We recommend adopting policies to protect natural forests, limiting large-scale clear-cutting and salvage logging, implementing ecological forestry, and restricting road building to reduce forest fragmentation.