Alternative trajectories of land abandonment: causes, consequences and research challenges
Introduction
Amid concern of increasing global land scarcity for food production and sharply increasing global food demand [1], land abandonment has been occurring in many diverse contexts. Some estimates suggest that an area the size of France was taken out of agricultural production globally between 1995 and 2005 [2]. In post-Soviet Russia alone more than 40 million ha of arable land was abandoned within 20 years [3]. Estimates for Latin America have placed afforestation-related abandonment at 36 million ha [4•]. Land abandonment is simultaneously praised for the potential of vegetation recovery and conservation [5••] and bemoaned as a loss of unique managed landscapes [6•]. The land-change [7] or land system [8] science community has spent considerable effort measuring, monitoring and modeling such patterns over the last two decades [9, 10•, 11]. This research has offered valuable insights into the underlying causes of these changes, evaluated winners and losers in such conversions and examined the often distal factors associated with abandonment [5••, 12].
Land abandonment is essentially a process ‘whereby human control over land (e.g. agriculture, forestry) is given up and the land is left to nature’ [2] (p. 1). This land-use transition, for example, the removal of land from commodity production, can facilitate vegetative succession [13]. Local bioclimatic zone and soil conditions shape the resulting ecological community [14], which could be successional forests with increased levels of woody vegetation, savanna grasslands or Mediterranean scrubland, among others. [4•]. Researchers often use remote sensing to detect these successional stages, in effect seeking to identify a transition in land cover(s) associated with a cessation of active land use; that is, ‘nonuse’. However, these successional stages may not represent an end state, but rather be a transition associated with different land-change trajectories of varying intensity and speed. This variation is reflected in long-term socioecological outcomes.
We begin with a simple example from southeastern Ohio, in the northern Appalachian region of the USA [15], to illustrate the complex social and environmental processes involved with abandonment transitions. Figure 1 depicts diverse land-use, land-cover and land-ownership transitions that occurred between 1955 and 2008. Forest cover has increased in the area over this time period. Former strip-mined areas are now reforested and incorporated into a national forest, whereas former agricultural fields are now subdivided into periurban residential lots with forest at the fringes. Thus, the cessation of extractive land uses and the transfer of land to new types of land users facilitated forest recovery, but the patterns of forest recovery have multiple underlying processes and possibilities for the future. Similarly, changes in land-use intensity such as transitions from row crops to pasture, or the advent of agroforestry or shade crops [16, 17] can be mistakenly classified as ‘abandoned’ by satellite imagery detecting land cover, but not land use.
In the sections that follow we summarize empirical findings to date, critically examine research challenges in studying abandonment commonly encountered in land-change science (LCS), and conclude with directions for future research.
Section snippets
Causes and consequences of land abandonment
Empirical LCS studies of abandonment patterns have examined the social and environmental causes and consequences of abandonment [5••, 18, 19•, 20]. General findings have suggested that abandonment occurs on remote, less productive land of lower agricultural profitability [13, 21]. Reforestation on steep slopes in mountainous regions is a common finding in North America [22], Europe [9, 23, 24, 25•], Latin America [4•, 16, 26] and Asia [27, 28, 29], and likewise on marginal lands in Africa [30].
Research challenges in studying abandonment
In this section, we critically review general LCS approaches to studying abandonment, and highlight key research challenges in detecting, describing and explaining patterns of land abandonment.
A major research thrust in land-change research is the broad-scale detection of areas of agricultural abandonment, primarily through comparison of remote sensing time-series data [52, 54, 55]. Abandonment is generally measured as the observable conversion of agricultural land use into late vegetative
Conclusions and future directions
Key priorities for future policy-relevant research involve addressing knowledge gaps in the conditions of land transition and abandonment. Global economic and environmental trends, filtered through institutional context, impact local decisions leading to abandonment. Successful policies must account for differences in local conditions that shape land transitions [66].
There are both positive and negative social and environmental consequences and tradeoffs of abandonment occurring over varying
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
This research received support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Award # 1010314, ‘CNH: Collaborative Research: Explaining Socioecological Resilience Following Collapse: Forest Recovery in Appalachian Ohio.’ The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the guest editors for their helpful suggestions that greatly improved the manuscript.
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