Multiple trajectories of grassland fragmentation, degradation, and recovery in Russias steppes
Prishchepov A.V. Myachina K.V. Kamp J. Smelansky I. Dubrovskaya S. Ryakhov R. Grudinin D. Yakovlev I. Urazaliyev R.
15 July 2021John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Land Degradation and Development
2021#32Issue 113220 - 3235 pp.
Over the 20th century, the Eurasian steppes underwent drastic land-cover changes. Much progress was made studying cropland expansion and the post-1990 (i.e., post-Soviet) agricultural land abandonment in Eurasia. However, the alteration of steppe landscapes may include other disturbances, such as oil and gas development, formal and informal roads and garbage dumps, which were not systematically documented. Considering the example of the steppe Orenburg Province in Russia, we reconstructed agricultural land-cover change dynamics using Landsat and Sentinel-2 imagery from 1990 to 2018. Furthermore, we used very high-resolution imagery and assessed the patterns and determinants of other steppe landscape anthropogenic disturbances. Our study showed that, despite steppe recovery due to widespread cropland abandonment from 1990 to 2018, the steppes, including the recovered steppe patches, underwent fragmentation due to informal roads, oil and gas development, shrub encroachment, garbage dumps and quarries, as well as abandonment of settlements and buildings. Only 6.4% of the sampled 7859 1×1 km blocks in 2018 showing grassland extent had no documented disturbances. The mapped disturbances occurred primarily near settlements and roads, while some disturbances occurred in remote areas. Given the accessibility of steppes, our study calls for a urgent need to systematically document alternatives to agricultural land uses in the steppes of Eurasia and other parts of the global grassland biome.
disturbance , enchroachment , grasslands , informal roads , land abandonment , land-cover change , machine-learning , mining , oil and gas development , recultivation , remote sensing , satellite imagery , steppes
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Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management (IGN), University of Copenhagen, København K, Denmark
Institute of Steppe of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Orenburg, Russian Federation
Conservation Biology Department, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Sibecocenter LLC, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation
Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Kazakhstan, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan
Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management (IGN)
Institute of Steppe of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Conservation Biology Department
Sibecocenter LLC
Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Kazakhstan
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