Structural Changes in the Romanian Economy Reflected through Corine Land Cover Datasets

Alexandru Rusu,Octavian Groza,Adrian Ursu,Oana Mihaela Stoleriu,Lucian Sfîcă,Ionuț Minea,Cristian Constantin Stoleriu,Lilian Niacșu

doi:10.3390/rs12081323

Alexandru Rusu, Octavian Groza + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12081323

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Journal: Remote sensing	Publication Date: Apr 22, 2020
Citations: 21	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University

Abstract

During the last 30 years, the Romanian economy has faced different challenges due to structural readjustments, overcoming crisis and globalization. The share of primary and secondary sectors in the gross domestic product have strongly decreased, while the services have taken off. The main objective for this study is to observe how these economic readjustments can be assessed and measured using the Corine Land Cover datasets from 1990, 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018 (with special observation on the range 2006 and 2018, after Romania was included in European Union). Despite some of the methodological limitations (like the minimum surface change), the Corine Land Cover turned out to be a powerful tool and it allowed us to detect an intense correlation between the socioeconomic and the structural trends in land use, in specific spatial contexts. The artificial surfaces are constantly increasing and this trend is rather visible as a distance function to the major Romanian cities. The most interesting changes occurred in the case of the agricultural polygons. The main trend emphasized by our analysis regards the redeployment of large farms in areas of agronomic and environmental territorial optimum. Such is the case for vineyards (after a decline during 2000–2006) and for annual cultures. All these changes in land-use patterns are too complex to be encompassed by a single methodology, which is why we used different tools, ranging from spatial analysis to geo-economic modeling, in order to detect how the Corine Land Cover datasets might be used for a better understanding of the Romanian economic readjustments.

Highlights

After 1990, during the post-communist period, Romania passed through complex social, economic and political transformations which led to radical background changes within some important fields such as land property and agricultural land exploitation
Despite the fact that the use of the Corine Land Cover (CLC) data integrated in a LAU2 frame is quite spread, many precautions are necessary at this level of analysis, if one will take into account aspects like the Minimum Mapping Unit (MMU = 25 ha/100 m), the possible Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) effect in the local data integration of land use and local trends of economic specialization [29]
The alternative geometry we propose is based on the concept of LAU1, an administrative geometry that Romania is officially missing, but which at policy level the topic is on the short list of administrative reform discussions and speculations

Summary

Introduction

After 1990, during the post-communist period, Romania passed through complex social, economic and political transformations which led to radical background changes within some important fields such as land property and agricultural land exploitation. Some of these transformations were investigated at global [1], European [2] and national levels using Corine Land Cover (CLC) datasets [3,4,5]. This is why we consider that the proper scale of CLC use for policy design should be an intermediate one, an administrative geometry that fits the needs of analysis somewhere between the local level and the Nomenclature of Units of Territorial Statistics (NUTS3) delineation [13]

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