During the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign, approximately 23 million hectares (Mha) of Eurasian steppe grassland were converted into cropland in Northern Kazakhstan from 1954 to 1963. As a result Kazakhstan became an important breadbasket of the former Soviet Union. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered widespread agricultural abandonment, and much cropland reverted to grasslands. Our goal in this study was to reconstruct and analyze agricultural land-cover change since the eve of the Virgin Lands Campaign, from 1953 to 2010 in Kostanay Province, a region that is representative of Northern Kazakhstan. Further, we assessed the potential of currently idle cropland for re-cultivation. We reconstructed the cropland extent before and after the Virgin Lands Campaign using archival maps, and we mapped the agricultural land cover in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period using multi-seasonal Landsat TM/ETM+ images from circa 1990, 2000 and 2010. Cropland extent peaked at approximately 3.

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Understanding grassland dynamics in the steppe zone of Kazakhstan -a remote sensing analysis DISSERTATION zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades doctor rerum naturalium (Dr. rer. nat.) im Fach Geographie eingereicht an der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin