Trajectories, causes and effects of land cover and land use changes in Central Europe

Land provides essential resources to society, including food, fuel, fibres and many other ecosystem services that support production functions, regulate risks of natural hazards, or provide cultural and spiritual services. By using the land, society modifies the provision of these services. Changes in land systems are main factors of global environmental change and at the same time have large consequences for the local environment and human well-being. Understanding and modelling of complex land systems and land change trajectories, the enhanced human pressures on the earth’s limited land resources, as well as the increasingly complex drivers of those changes, have been key objectives for land change science or land system science (LSS).

Central Europe has experienced drastic changes in political, economic, and societal structures since 1990. The shift from centralised command economies to market-oriented systems has altered economic opportunities, induced technological changes and fostered rapid demographic processes. In 2004, economic and political conditions changed again significantly for some Central and Eastern European countries with their accession to the European Union. Socio-economic and political boundary conditions constitute the framework for land use decisions and the system change in Central and Eastern Europe had a strong impact on land management. This offers unique opportunities for land change scientists, because the post-socialist political and economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe can be interpreted as a “natural laboratory” that may reveal important insights on the effects of institutional and socioeconomic changes on land dynamics and also allow to develop and improved methodologies with allow to assess and model land changes, its causes and consequences.

Currently, there are only a few studies in regional scale which have been summarised in detail land use change in this region. Therefore, the first aim of this project is to apply for recent advances in remote sensing for wall-to-wall mapping of land cover and land use change trajectories using optical and radar imagery and advantage of data-dense time series across Central Europe over last fifty years. We will focus on four countries from Central Europe (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia) which joined the EU in 2004 and in particular on processes like agricultural areas abandonment or wildland-urban interface. The second aim is to better understand the causes of land cover and land use change across Central Europe and improve approaches which allow to assess them. Finally, similar case studies provide substantial evidence for significant effects of land cover and land use change on biodiversity and carbon pools and fluxes. Therefore, the third aim is to assess the effects of land cover and land use change on biodiversity and carbon pools and fluxes across Central Europe also here to apply advantage of remote sensing data and methods use.

[We gratefully acknowledge support by the Polish National Science Centre, project no. 2018/29/B/ST10/02979]