This work analyzes the effects of one of the most dramatic changes of entire societies that the world has ever witnessed. It explores the collapse of socialist governance and management systems on land cover and land use in various parts of Eastern Europe. As readers will discover, this involved rapid and unprecedented changes such as widespread agricultural abandonment. Changes in the countries of the former Soviet block, former Soviet Union republics, and European Russia are compared and contrasted. Contributing authors cover topics such as the carbon cycle and the environment, effects of institutional changes on urban centers and agriculture, as well as changes in wildlife populations. The volume includes analysis of the drivers of agricultural land abandonment, forest changes in Black Sea region, an extreme drought event of 2010, impacts of fires on air quality and other land-cover/land-use issues in Eastern Europe. Satellite data used were mostly from optical sensors including night lights observations, with both coarse and medium spatial resolution. Ultimately, this work highlights the importance of understanding socioeconomic shocks: that is, those brief periods during which societies change rapidly resulting in significant impact on land use and the environment. Thus it shows that change is often abrupt rather than gradual and thereby much harder to predict. This book is a truly international and interdisciplinary effort, written by a team of scientists from the USA, Europe, and Russia. It will be of interest to a broad range of scientists at all levels within natural and social sciences, including those studying recent and ongoing changes in Europe. In particular, it will appeal to geographers, environmental scientists, remote sensing specialists, social scientists and agricultural scientists.

Land use and land cover (LULC) as well as its changes (LUCC) are an interplay between bio-geophysical characteristics of the landscape and climate as well as the complex human interaction including its different patterns of utilization superimposed on the natural vegetation. LULC is a core information layer for a variety of scientific and administrative tasks(e.g. hydrological modelling, climate models, land use planning).In particular in the context of climate change with its impacts on socio-economic, socio-ecologic systems as well as ecosystem services precise information on LULC and LUCC are mandatory baseline datasets required over large areas. Remote sensing can provide such information on different levels of detail and in a homogeneous and reliable way. Hence, LULC mapping can be regarded as a prototype for integrated approaches based on spaceborne and airborne remote sensing techniques combined with field observations. The book provides for the first time a comprehensive view of various LULC activities focusing on European initiatives, such as the LUCAS surveys, the CORINE land covers, the ESA/EU GMES program and its resulting Fast-Track- and Downstream Services, the EU JRC Global Land Cover, the ESA GlobCover project as well as the ESA initiative on Essential Climate Variables. All have and are producing highly appreciated land cover products. The book will cover the operational approaches, but also review current state-of-the-art scientific methodologies and recommendations for this field. It opens the view with best-practice examples that lead to a view that exceeds pure mapping, but to investigate into drivers and causes as well as future projections.

The rural landscapes of Europe have been radically modified over the last four decades, not only as a result of urban expansion, but primarily due to changes in agriculture, i.e. increased intensification of production in some areas and "extensification" - land being taken out of production - in other areas. This volume presents a comparison of rural land-use change and landscape pattern dynamics in different parts of Europe.

This open access book presents and discusses current issues and innovative solution approaches for land management in a European context. Manifold sustainability issues are closely interconnected with land use practices. Throughout the world, we face increasing conflict over the use of land as well as competition for land. Drawing on experience in sustainable land management gained from seven years of the FONA programme (Research for Sustainable Development, conducted under the auspices of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research), the book stresses and highlights co-design processes within the “co-creation of knowledge”, involving collaboration in transdisciplinary research processes between academia and other stakeholders. The book begins with an overview of the current state of land use practices and the subsequent need to manage land resources more sustainably. New system solutions and governance approaches in sustainable land management are presented from a European perspective on land use. The volume also addresses how to use new modes of knowledge transfer between science and practice. New perspectives in sustainable land management and methods of combining knowledge and action are presented to a broad readership in land system sciences and environmental sciences, social sciences and geosciences. This book received the Gerd Albers Award. The prize is awarded by the International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP).

Agroforestry has come of age during the past three decades. The age-old practice of growing trees and crops and sometimes animals in interacting combinations – that has been ignored in the single-commodity-oriented agricultural and forestry development paradigms – has been brought into the realm of modern land-use. Today agroforestry is well on its way to becoming a specialized science at a level similar to those of crop science and forestry science. To most land-use experts, however, agroforestry has a tropical connotation. They consider agroforestry as something that can and can only be identified with the tropics. That is a wrong perception. While it is true that the tropics, compared to the temperate regions, have a wider array of agroforestry systems and hold greater promise for potential agroforestry interventions, it is also true that agroforestry has several opportunities in the temperate regions too. Indeed, the role of agroforestry is now recognized in Europe as exemplified by this book, North America, and elsewhere in the temperate zone. Current interest in ecosystem management in industrialized countries strongly suggests that there is a need to embrace and apply agroforestry principles to help mitigate the environmental problems caused or exacerbated by commercial agricultural and forestry production enterprises.

The objective of this book is to analyze changes in the landscape of Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic since the first half of the 19th century. The text focuses not only on describing these considerable changes by means of statistical and spatial data, but also on explaining the processes, societal, economic, political and institutional forces that drive them. Drawing on more than two decades of experience with land use research, the authors have combined methods and approaches from the fields of human geography, cartography, landscape ecology, historical geography and environmental history. The authors understand land use research as a way of analyzing nature-society interactions, their development, spatial aspects, causes and impacts. Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic serves as an example, combining general processes occurring in landscapes of developed countries with the results of regionally specific driving forces, most of them political (world wars, communism, return to market economy etc.).

This book gives an overview of the state of research in fields pertaining to the detection, understanding and prediction of global change impacts in mountain regions. More than sixty contributions from paleoclimatology, cryospheric research, hydrology, ecology, and development studies are compiled in this volume, each with an outlook on future research directions. The book will interest meteorologists, geologists, botanists and climatologists.