With increasing affluence in many developing countries, the demand for livestock products is rising and the increasing feed requirement contributes to pressure on land resources for food and energy production. However, there is currently a knowledge gap in our ability to assess the extent and...

As the global food system contributes significantly to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, understanding the sources of GHG emissions embodied in different components of food systems is important. The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a massive restructuring of the domestic food systems,...

Aim: Large and ecologically functioning steppe complexes have been lost historically across the globe, but recent land-use changes may allow the reversal of this trend in some regions. We aimed to develop and map indicators of changing human influence using satellite imagery and historical maps,...

Russia is a major player in the global wheat market, but extensive unused land resources and large yield gaps suggest that wheat production can be substantially increased. We combined time series of cultivated cropland, abandoned cropland and yield gap estimates to assess the potential...

Crop yields must increase substantially to meet the increasing demands for agricultural products. Crop yield increases are particularly important for Russia because low crop yields prevail across Russia’s widespread and fertile land resources. However, reliable data are lacking regarding the...

Changes in land use and climate are the main drivers of change in soil organic matter contents. We investigated the impact of the largest policy-induced land conversion to arable land, the Virgin Lands Campaign (VLC), from 1954 to 1963, of the massive cropland abandonment after 1990 and of...

Knowledge of the spatial distribution of agricultural abandonment following the collapse of the Soviet Union is highly uncertain. To help improve this situation, we have developed a new map of arable and abandoned land for 2010 at a 10 arc-second resolution. We have fused together existing land...

Socio-economic and institutional changes may accelerate land-use and land-cover change. Our goal was to explore the determinants of agricultural land abandonment within one agro-climatic and economic region of post-Soviet European Russia during the first decade of transition from a state-command...

Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using...