Abstract
The abandonment and cultivation of croplands in the Eurasian Steppe has become the focus of global and regional food security and agricultural policy-making. A large area of cropland in some post-Soviet countries has proven to be abandoned with the disintegration of the Soviet Union; however, it is unclear as to whether Kazakhstan also experienced a similar change as one of the main food providers for the former Soviet Union. In this study, we used the annual land cover dataset (1992–2015) from the European Space Agency, Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) to detect spatio-temporal characteristics of rainfed and irrigated cropland changes in Kazakhstan. The Mann–Kendall test and regime shift analysis showed that rainfed and irrigated cropland at national level had a significant increasing trend with a significant rising up to 1999 and stagnation during 2000–2015, which was further confirmed with analysis at 14 regions. The greatest contributor to rainfed and irrigated croplands was steppes, followed by shrinkage of water bodies since 2005 to a great extent, rapid urbanization process resulted in losses of a part of irrigated oases. The trend surface analysis indicated that reorganized stable pattern characterized by rainfed cropland in north and irrigated cropland in south was driven by the strategy of the gradual agricultural development of oases. The nonexistence of cycle between the abandonment and recultivation proved that newly-gained cropland from steppe may be less degraded and more productive for sustainable land use in Kazakhstan. In conclusion, this study can provide strong evidence for sustainable land use and a basis for food security policy-making in Kazakhstan, and even all of the Central Asian countries in the future.
Highlights
The Eurasian Steppe has historically served as the home for pastoral nomads [1,2,3]
The Mann–Kendall test showed that the increasing trend was significant (p < 0.05) (Table 2), and significant change occurred in 1999 (RSI1999 = 2.456) (Figure 2a), whereas areas of irrigated cropland increased from 69,750 km2 to 76,223 km2, or an increasing rate of 9.28%, with significant increasing trend (p < 0.05) (Table 2) and two significant change points in 1999 and 2003 respectively (RSI1999 = 2.319, RSI2003 = 0.408) (Figure 2b)
Data from FAO statistics showed that the area of arable land in Kazakhstan decreased from 350,550 km2 to 293,950 km2, a decreasing rate of 16.15% at the same period, with a significant decreasing trend (p < 0.05) (Table 2) and two significant change points in 1996 and 2000 respectively (RSI1996 = −1.283, RSI2000 = −2.001) (Figure 2c)
Summary
The Eurasian Steppe has historically served as the home for pastoral nomads [1,2,3]. Since the last Ice Age, this large inland area had been disturbed by the encroachment of sedentary civilization, which was accompanied by intensified grazing and cropland cultivation [4,5]; this change was gradual and fluctuated. Drastic changes started at the beginning of the 20th century when increasingly larger areas of the Eurasian Steppe became parts of communist states, especially the former Soviet Union [6,7,8], and peaked between the 1950s and 1960s with the Virgin Land Program in the former Soviet Union [9] and the Great Leap Campaign in China [10]. A very large steppe area was exploited for agricultural production, and the steppe region as a whole had become the food base of Russia, Europe and China [11,12,13] Another radical change occurred following the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991, when large tracts of government-controlled cultivated land were returned to herders or farmers. Frantic production reemerged, and the re-plowing of the secondary steppes began, which was intense in some post-Soviet countries [16,17]
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