Abandoned lands in Russia: distribution, agroecological status and perspective use (a review)

According to some estimations, over the 20th century (1897–2007) about 70 million hectares of agricultural land were abandoned in Russia. Part of this land became occupied by growing cities, industry and infrastructure. However, the major part, estimated as from 30–45 to more 60 million hectares, became truly abandoned, undergoing the natural processes of postagrogenic ecosystem restoration. Official recording of spontaneously abandoned areas during the country’s crisis of the 1990s was never conducted. Therefore, currently it is difficult to estimate objectively the area occupied by abandoned lands and their soil and agroecological potential. The aim of the work was to characterize the abandoned lands in Russia by reviewing published reports, as well as the author’s own data, taking into account the spread of such lands and the agroecological condition, discussing the reasons for arable land abandonment and drawing the putative directions of their rational use. The article contains a table listing published (2006–2023) reports of soil and vegetation studies during postagrogenic successions on the abandoned lands in Russia. Many researchers emphasize that to make a decision about ploughing once again abandoned lands, soil and vegetation at each site should be examined, and financial and other expenditures assessed. The mosaic of abandoned lands throughout the huge country may result in high probability of the degraded soil underlying such lands, which makes re-using such lands for ploughing and cropping not rational and can even be harmful due to facilitating various kinds of degradation. Abandoned lands can be relatively safely used for haying and grazing (fodder); for forestry with diverse resources and respective activities provided by the forest ecosystems, such as wood cutting, hunting, collecting berries, mushrooms and medicinal plants, and thus substituting the potential crop yields; for recreation or preserving the biosphere resources; for sequestration of greenhouse gases (so called Kyoto plantations) and for rural tourism. Thus, it is urgent to seek solutions differentiated in accordance with soil and vegetation status of abandoned lands, as well as with other natural and socio-economic factors. Generalizing the information about the distribution and agroecological condition of the abandoned land in Russia enables researchers, land users and a broad range of specialists in natural resources assessment and preservation to forecast processes, occurring in soils and vegetation during postagrogenic successions and hence to make more scientifically and rationally justified decisions about the use of abandoned lands.