Abstract
The massive abandonment of arable land in Russia in the 1990s had a heavy impact on the country’s land-use structure. The cessation of cultivation leads to a decrease of provisioning ecosystem services within the landscape, while creating an opportunity to enhance the supply of diverse regulation services. Consideration of this opportunity is increasingly important for environmental management and landscape planning. In this article, we present an approach for assessing the environmental benefits of ecosystems developing on abandoned arable lands in the forested zone of European Russia. The proposed methodology is established on a land-cover based framework – ecosystem services assessment matrix. For assessment purposes, abandoned arable lands at different stages of vegetation recovery succession (ruderal, grassland and small-leaved forest) are considered as different land-cover types. Four classes of regulating ecosystem services are subject to qualitative analysis: regulation of the chemical composition of the atmosphere, control of erosion rates, regulation of soil quality and pollination. An exemplary application of the proposed methodology for the case study area located in the Moscow Region of Russia is presented in the article. The results of the qualitative assessment revealed an association between the stage of vegetation recovery succession which corresponds with the time since land abandonment and the supply of regulating ecosystem services. The recovery of natural vegetation leads to higher levels of carbon sequestration, more effective erosion mitigation, soil recovery and increased pollinator abundance. Cropland was proven to be a recipient of the services provided by natural ecosystems. Thus, the return of all uncultivated fields to agricultural use will cause a substantial decrease in the ecological value of the study area.
Highlights
Agricultural land abandonment is a common land-use trend of the last few decades across the developed and transition economies, such as EU countries and post-Soviet countries (Romanenko 2008, Lasanta et al 2019)
The ecosystem services (ES) of regulation of the chemical composition of the atmosphere is important in the context of climate change, given that individual ecosystems play a vital role in the global carbon cycle
The assessment of regulating ecosystem services with the ES matrix approach revealed that ecosystems in the study area vary in their ability to support the ecological integrity and stability of the agricultural landscape
Summary
Agricultural land abandonment is a common land-use trend of the last few decades across the developed and transition economies, such as EU countries and post-Soviet countries (Romanenko 2008, Lasanta et al 2019). This land-use process is driven mainly by the intensification of agriculture or by various socio-economic factors, including market incentives, rural depopulation and industrialisation (Rey Benayas 2007). In Russia, massive withdrawal of cropland and pasture from agricultural use took place in the 1990s following the decline of the Soviet system This phenomenon was determined by largescale socio-economic and institutional changes, followed by a deep crisis in the agricultural sector. According to the latest Russian Agricultural Census (2016), the proportion of abandoned agricultural land remains high: it may be as great as 44% of the original cultivated land
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
