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Garik Gutman
Volker Radeloff
Editors
Land-Cover and
Land-Use Changes
in Eastern Europe
after the Collapse
of the Soviet Union
in 1991
Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes in Eastern
Europe after the Collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991
Garik Gutman Volker Radeloff
•
Editors
Land-Cover and Land-Use

Changes in Eastern Europe
after the Collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991
123
Editors
Garik Gutman Volker Radeloff
NASA Headquarters Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology
Washington, DC University of Wisconsin
USA Madison, WI
USA
ISBN 978-3-319-42636-5 ISBN 978-3-319-42638-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42638-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016947198
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

All rights reserved for parts/chapters written by US Government employees 2017, Chapters 1 and 3.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part
of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations,
recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission
or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar
methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from
the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or
for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: The border area of Belarus and Russia as depicted in a Landsat satellite image from
the summer of 2000. Belarus lays to the west, and this is where agriculture remains active, field
boundaries are clearly visible, and many fields appear in white and beige, representing freshly plowed
soils, or bright orange, representing young crops. The situation in Belarus is very different from that in
Russia, to the east, where almost all agriculture was abandoned: field boundaries are diminished, and
many areas appearing in blue-green colors represent early-successional vegetation. Settlements on the
Belarussian side include Drybin and Mscislau, on the Russian side Monastyrshchina and Khislavichi.
The satellite image was recorded by Landsat 7 ETM+ on June 6th of 2000, and provided by the US
Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation and Science Center.
Printed on acid-free paper
This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland
Preface
The breakup of the Soviet Union and collapse of the socialism in Eastern Europe in
the late 1980s and early 1990s had major ramifications for the structure of societies,
economies, and the way people used their land. Collectivized farms have transi-
tioned to privately owned fields. Many arable lands have been abandoned and urban
centers experienced substantial changes, both growth and decay, depending on the
country, as manifested by space observations of nighttime lights. Forests damaged
by industrial pollution in Soviet era recovered towards the end of the twentieth
century. At the same time, satellite observations have been accumulated during the
last 20–25 years to provide data-rich time series over land surfaces, allowing
systematic analysis of the changes in land cover and land use observed from space.
This book describes and analyzes the effects of the collapse of socialist gover-
nance and management systems on land cover and land use in various parts of
Eastern Europe including the countries of the former Soviet block, former Soviet
Union republics, and European Russia. This book is a compilation of results from
studies on land-cover and land-use changes and their interactions with carbon cycle
and environment, effects of institutional changes on urban centers and agriculture,
as well as changes in wildlife populations. The book is a truly international inter-
disciplinary effort written by an international team consisting of scientists from the
USA, Europe, and Russia under the auspices of the Northern Eurasia Earth Science
Partnership Initiative (NEESPI) supported by the NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use
Change Program.
This book is of interest and directed to a broad range of scientists within natural
and social science, involved in studying recent and ongoing changes in Europe, be
they senior scientists, early career scientists, or students. The chapters of this book
summarize analyses of the dramatic changes in land uses triggered by the abrupt
change in the economies of the region and in land management. The satellite data
used for these studies were mostly from optical sensors, including night lights
observations, with both coarse and medium spatial resolution. The volume includes
analysis of the drivers of agricultural land abandonment, forest changes in Black
v
vi Preface
Sea region, an extreme drought event of 2010, impacts of fires on air quality and
other land-cover/land-use issues in Eastern Europe.
We warmly thank all the contributors of this book and acknowledge NASA
support.
Washington, DC, USA Garik Gutman

Madison, WI, USA Volker Radeloff
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
V.C. Radeloff and G. Gutman
Overview of Changes in Land Use and Land Cover
in Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Jan Feranec, Tomas Soukup, Gregory N. Taff, Premysl Stych
and Ivan Bicik
Lighting Tracks Transition in Eastern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
C.D. Elvidge, F.-C. Hsu, K.E. Baugh and T. Ghosh
Land Change in the Carpathian Region Before
and After Major Institutional Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Catalina Munteanu, Volker Radeloff, Patrick Griffiths, Lubos Halada,
Domink Kaim, Jan Knorn, Jacek Kozak, Tobias Kuemmerle,
Juraj Lieskovsky, Daniel Müller, Katarzyna Ostapowicz,
Oleksandra Shandra and Premysl Stych
Underlying Drivers and Spatial Determinants of post-Soviet
Agricultural Land Abandonment in Temperate Eastern Europe . . . . . . 91
Alexander V. Prishchepov, Daniel Müller, Matthias Baumann,
Tobias Kuemmerle, Camilo Alcantara and Volker C. Radeloff
The Effects of Institutional Changes on Landscapes in Ukraine . . . . . . . 119
V. Lyalko, S. Ivanov, V. Starodubtsev and J. Palamarchuk
Forest Changes and Carbon Budgets in the Black Sea Region . . . . . . . . 149
M. Ozdogan, P. Olofsson, C.E. Woodcock and A. Baccini
Land Management and the Impact of the 2010 Extreme
Drought Event on the Agricultural and Ecological Systems
of European Russia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
Tatiana Loboda, Olga Krankina, Igor Savin, Eldar Kurbanov
and Joanne Hall
vii
viii Contents
Agricultural Fires in European Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania

and Their Impact on Air Quality, 2002–2012 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Jessica L. McCarty, Alexander Krylov, Alexander V. Prishchepov,
David M. Banach, Alexandra Tyukavina, Peter Potapov
and Svetlana Turubanova
Land Change in European Russia: 1982–2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Kirsten de Beurs, Grigory Ioffe, Tatyana Nefedova and Geoffrey Henebry
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Introduction
V.C. Radeloff and G. Gutman
1 Background
If lucky, each generation of land use scientists can study one or two major natural
experiments, those historic events that rapidly change land use over large areas. The
collapse of socialism throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s
was such an event. The collapse was a natural experiment of rare magnitude that
affected every aspect of societies, economies and land use practices. This book
focuses on Eastern Europe, including the European part of Russia, because of the
opportunity that the collapse of socialism entails for land science.
For almost half a century, starting with the descent of the Iron Curtain in the
aftermath of the Second World War, Eastern Europe was part of the Soviet Bloc.
Socialist governments had taken power in Russia and parts of Ukraine and Belarus
after the First World War. However, other parts of Eastern Europe became socialist
only after Stalin’s Red Army defeated Nazi Germany and conquered all of Eastern
Europe. What followed was almost half a century of socialist rule, and with it the
collectivization of agricultural fields, conversion of forests into public ownership
and construction of industrial centers (Lerman et al. 2004).
Economies throughout Eastern Europe were centrally planned in each nation’s
capital, and communist parties ruled without much open opposition. Few goods
were traded in global markets, but the Soviet Bloc created its own internal market,
and various subsidies kept inefficient enterprises afloat. For land use, this meant that
farming was largely organized in collectivized farms, which were modeled after the
V.C. Radeloff (&)

SILVIS Lab, Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
e-mail: radeloff@wisc.edu
G. Gutman
NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change Program, 300 E Street SW,
Washington DC 20546, USA
© Springer International Publishing (outside the USA) 2017 1

G. Gutman and V. Radeloff (eds.), Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes
in Eastern Europe after the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42638-9_1
2 V.C. Radeloff and G. Gutman
Russian ‘kolchozes’ with large field sizes, heavy reliance on fertilizers and pesti-
cides, and the draining of wetlands (Lerman et al. 2004).
The collapse of socialism started in August 1989, when the very first opening of
the Iron Curtain occurred near the small town of Sopron, Hungary. What was
intended to be a 3-hour long opening of the border to allow Austrian and Hungarian
locals to cross and meet turned into an opening of floodgates that Eastern Germans
vacationing nearby used to escape. At this point, reform was in the air in many
Eastern European countries, starting with the ‘perestroika’ (restructuring) of the
Russian government and the ‘glasnost’ (openness) policy reforms that Mikhail
Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, initiated in the late 1980s.
Once the Iron Curtain started to rip, changes came swiftly, and it was a heady
time. In November 1989, the dreaded wall between East and West Germany fell.
Pictures of people in Berlin chiseling holes into the concrete made global news.
Remarkably, no shots were fired in Berlin and most other capitals as the protests
multiplied. The same socialist governments that had ruled with iron hands for so
many decades collapsed largely without bloodshed. The notable exception was
Romania, where Nicolae Ceaucescu ordered that protesters be gunned down in the
city of Timisoara on December 17th, only to be tried and executed eight days later,
on Christmas Day 1989. Exactly two years later on December 25th 1991, Mikhail
Gorbachev resigned, and the mighty Soviet Union, a global power throughout the
cold war, formally disbanded. The remaining fifteen socialist republics emerged as
post-Soviet countries.
In the stale language of science, this collapse was the treatment in an epic natural
experiment. The collapse triggered massive changes in the way economies
throughout Eastern Europe operated and how land was managed. Many of these
changes followed the guise of ‘shock therapy’, advocated by J. Sachs and other
economists from Harvard University. Their basic premise was that a liberal market
economy would be the best cure for the ailing socialist state economies. Their advice
was to privatize what was owned by the state, remove subsidies and open Eastern
European markets to global trade. What followed was certainly a shock. Russia’s
GDP, for example, was cut in half in a single year (http://data.worldbank.org). The
human toll associated with these changes was enormous, as Eastern Europe expe-
rienced a phase of chaos in the early 1990s. Suicide rates spiked and birth rates
dropped as people lost faith in the future. Additionally, health care systems col-
lapsed and pensioners, who had trusted that the state would provide for them in old
age, suddenly had no money left to live on. Simultaneously, there were those who
seized the moment and became enormously rich by accruing far more than their fair
share of previously state-owned wealth. What occurred after the collapse of the
Soviet Union was not a controlled experiment but a rather messy one. Differences in
the cultures and histories of many Eastern Europe countries dictated how each
would transition from a state-controlled economy to a market economy.
Indeed, there were important differences in the ways that socialism had been
implemented in each country. For example, most countries did not allow private
land ownership other than small garden plots; however, much of Poland’s agri-
cultural land remained in small, private holdings, which affected agricultural
Introduction 3
changes after the collapse (Lerman et al. 2004). Another important difference was
based on the times that different countries became socialistic. In those countries
where socialism was established after the Second World War, land was often
restituted after the collapse to the heirs of prior owners. However, this was not the
case in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, where socialism took hold earlier. Agricultural
policies also differed. For example, Belarus retained many of its agricultural sub-
sidies after the collapse, while most other countries did not (Prishchepov et al.
2012, 2017). Differences among countries is the second reason why Eastern Europe
in the 1990s is such a great natural experiment. The fact that so many countries
were involved and transitioned differently provides opportunities to compare
countries and identify how specific policies and histories affect land-use change.
Finally, the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe occurred during a time span for
which frequent and consistent satellite images are available. Therefore, land-use
changes that occurred during that span can be accurately mapped over large areas at
high spatial resolution. Landsat data with 30-m resolution became available when
Landsat 4 was launched in July 1982. Landsat 5 has an incredible record of con-
tinuous image capture from March 1984 to January of 2013 making Landsat data
the most important data source for land-use change monitoring (Kuemmerle et al.
2008; Knorn et al. 2009; Prishchepov et al. 2012; Potapov et al. 2015). The fact that
consistent satellite data are available for the last phase of socialism, and ever since,
and that all of this data is now readily and freely available thanks to USGS’s data
policies (Wulder et al. 2012) means that the natural experiment that Eastern Europe
provides was very well recorded. In addition to Landsat, MODIS sensors on both
Aqua and Terra satellites have been a key data source for land monitoring in
Eastern Europe after 2001, sometimes in combination with AVHRR data to capture
long time periods (de Beurs and Henebry 2004; de Beurs et al. 2017).
In summary, why does this book focus on land-use change in Eastern Europe
after the collapse of socialism? It is because of the unique natural experiment that
this collapse represents, the magnitude of the shock to Eastern European societies
and the differences among countries that allow the different effects of policy
changes to be studied. Why compile a book on land-use change in Eastern Europe
now? A quarter century has passed since the collapse of socialism, which means
that enough time has passed to identify the changes that were temporary and those
that are more permanent.
2 Major Land-Use Trends After the Collapse
Each chapter of this book provides a detailed look at the land-use changes that
occurred after the collapse of socialism, highlighting the richness of the patterns and
their underlying processes. This introduction only provides a general overview of
the major land-use change trends in agricultural areas, forests and urban areas,
providing a framework within which the specific changes that occurred can be
interpreted. Further details are described in the subsequent chapters.
2.1 Agricultural Changes
Agricultural land use was strongly affected by the collapse of socialism. One of
most notable results of the collapse was the widespread abandonment of agricul-
tural lands in most Eastern European countries (Alcantara et al. 2013; Estel et al.
2015; de Beurs et al. 2017; Feranec et al. 2017; Lyalko et al. 2017) (Fig. 1). The
reasons for this abandonment were manifold. One important factor throughout the
region was the abolishment of agricultural subsidies that farms had relied on pre-
viously (Prishchepov et al. 2013, 2017). Lacking subsidies made it exceptionally
difficult to transition to a market economy. The lack of subsidies was compounded
by a lack of access to credit, which limited the ability to invest in new technologies
and machines.
Market changes and trade partnerships also fostered agricultural abandonment.
During socialist times, markets for agricultural goods were guaranteed and sheltered
from competition from the West; however, that changed quickly after the collapse.
At the same time, it became more costly to obtain necessary inputs, such as fer-
tilizers and pesticides, making it difficult to continue to farm.
A third major reason for the abandonment of agricultural lands was uncertainty
in land ownership (Lerman et al. 2004; Baumann et al. 2011). In some countries,
such as Slovakia, land was restituted to pre-socialist owners, but the parcel sizes
Fig. 1 Abandoned agricultural areas in Eastern Europe in 2005 mapped using MODIS satellite
imagery (Alcantara et al. 2013)
Introduction 5
were too small to make modern farming viable. In addition, many of the heirs of
prior owners lived in cities and had little interest in farming (Kuemmerle et al.
2006). In other countries, such as Russia, ownership shares in communal farms
were distributed to their former workers, making it difficult for those who wished to
continue farming to obtain the rights to do so. This created uncertainty as to
whether or not those attempting to farm would be able to reap the benefits of any
investments that they were making.
However, agricultural abandonment exhibited strong spatial patterns. The rates
of abandonment differed greatly throughout Eastern Europe. Temperate European
Russia is one region where abandonment rates were high, abandonment was per-
manent and fields were converted to forests (de Beurs et al. 2017; Prishchepov et al.
2017). These changes were due to the area’s marginal farming conditions, harsh
climate, poor soils and limited market access. Another major reason for abandon-
ment in northern Russia was the depopulation of many rural areas following the
collapse, which reduced the local labor force (Ioffe and Nefedova 1997, 2000). In
other words, abandonment was the response to new economic conditions that made
farming no longer profitable.
In the central part of Eastern Europe, a somewhat different picture emerged,
where abandonment was common during the 1990s, but re-cultivation has occurred
on large areas since (Estel et al. 2015; de Beurs et al. 2017). The reasons why
abandonment was less permanent here included better environmental conditions
and access to internal markets. In addition, countries west of Belarus and Ukraine
joined the EU in 2003, providing access to subsidies and easier access to
West-European markets.
In southern European Russia, where soils are very fertile, abandonment was
generally less common, and yet a different trend emerged (de Beurs et al. 2017).
Here, industrial agriculture has taken hold, and yields are much higher now than they
were during socialist times. Yield increases in this black-earth region are the reason
why Russia is now a wheat-exporting country in most years. This situation is vastly
different from times when the Soviet Union had to purchase wheat from the United
States to meet its demand. However, the drought risk is high in parts of southern
Russia (Loboda et al. 2017). Thus, fields may not provide harvests each year (de
Beurs et al. 2017), and agricultural burning is widespread (McCarty et al. 2017).
In addition to these general patterns, it is important to note that agricultural
abandonment can take many different forms (Estel et al. 2015). In the most extreme
case, fields that were formerly ploughed and used for row crops have been com-
pletely abandoned. Forests have regrown in these areas, which are typically dom-
inated by early-successional species such as birch and pine. However, various
forms of partial abandonment and reduced agricultural land use-intensity also
occurred. For example, areas that were formerly used for row crops have been
converted to pastures or are mowed for hay. In addition, some fields are now only
plowed every second or third year. Fallow years allow for the regeneration of soils,
and ploughing prevents forest growth. Similarly, hay fields may be cut less fre-
quently within a given year or are no longer fertilized. Finally, in countries that are
part of the European Union, grasslands may only be cut to become eligible for
subsidy payments, without actually utilizing the hay. These forms of land-use
changes can represent the initial steps toward total abandonment, but they can also
represent a temporary measure until economic conditions become suitable for more
intensive farming.
2.2 Forest Changes
When socialism collapsed, so did timber markets in Eastern Europe. Logging rates
generally declined throughout the region in the 1990s and have only partially
recovered thereafter (Potapov et al. 2015). However, there have been many
important deviations from this general trend due to environmental and policy dif-
ferences (Fig. 2).
The reasons that caused logging rates to decline immediately after the collapse
were similar to those that caused agricultural abandonment. Guaranteed markets for
timber vanished. The companies that formerly processed wood largely ceased to
exist. In addition, customers were less likely to purchase furniture or build houses in
the early 1990s. However, the collapse of socialism also diminished the level of
Fig. 2 Forest losses and gains in Eastern Europe from 1985 to 2012 (main map) and a Landsat
satellite composite (inset map) (Potapov et al. 2015)
Introduction 7
enforcement of the rules and regulations governing logging, causing a spike in log-
ging in some areas at the time of the collapse (Baumann et al. 2011). Many of these
logging activities were illegal or semi-legal, i.e., logging that exploited loopholes and
stretched the definition of what was allowable. For example, one important loophole
was associated with ‘sanitary cuts’, i.e., harvests after insect defoliation, which
became widespread in parts of the Carpathians (Kuemmerle et al. 2011).
Another important factor that caused a rapid logging increase in some countries
was the restitution of forest lands to former owners. In the Baltic countries, this
occurred relatively early. Harvesting rates have been exceptionally high there and
are likely not sustainable, i.e., harvesting levels are exceeding timber growth rate
(Potapov et al. 2015). Logging spiked in Baltic countries due to the nearby,
well-developed Scandinavian forest industry. The restitution of forest lands was not
always immediate though. For example, restitution did not take place in Romania
until the 2000s. However, Romanian forests that have been restituted have also
experienced high logging rates associated with high demand, as international
companies have built large sawmills in the country (Knorn et al. 2013; Munteanu
et al. 2015, 2017).
The logging examples in the Baltic countries and Romania highlight that access to
global markets has largely caused logging rates to increase in various countries,
particularly after 2000. Global demand for timber was high until the economic crisis
of 2008. Eastern Europe’s vast forests, many of which are relatively old, constitute a
valuable resource. Notably, international demand is for not only roundwood and pulp
but also firewood. Firewood production is typically the result of local demand in
various countries, such as Georgia (Ozdogan et al. 2017). However, German fire-
wood demand is a major reason why beech forests are being harvested in Bulgaria and
Romania. These practices threaten forests with high conservation values to support
what is considered a more ‘green’ method of heating homes in the West.
2.3 Urbanization
The third major land-use trend is the growth of urban areas throughout Eastern
Europe (Elvidge et al. 2017; Feranec et al. 2017). Major cities have experienced
large population increases, including in countries where overall population numbers
have declined. These trends are due to a combination of market forces and policies.
Concomitant with the shift of Eastern European economies from state-controlled to
open markets, a shift also occurred among sectors, as both the agricultural and
industrial sectors declined and the service sector grew. However, many of these
new service jobs were concentrated in cities to which young people moved.
In terms of policies, the growth of cities was possible because land-use regu-
lations were relatively weak, or weakly enforced, putting few obstacles in the way
of new housing development. Another important policy change was the abolish-
ment of restrictions associated with moving from the countryside to cities, which
limited internal migration in the former Soviet Union. The result was the collapse of
many rural areas and the abandonment of villages due to the rapid growth in
Moscow (Fig. 3), St. Petersburg and many other metropolitan areas throughout
Eastern Europe.
However, some rural areas have witnessed considerable housing growth, and
those are areas with high natural amenities, such as mountains, or that are relatively
Fig. 3 Rapid urban growth in the areas around Moscow. The city of Moscow is shown in the
upper left image. The red box highlights the areas that are depicted in detail below. The center
image in the first row shows typical high-rise apartment buildings, which are highlighted by red
ellipses in the images below. The right image in the first row shows a typical single-family home
development, as highlighted by the orange ellipses in the images below. The two bottom Landsat
images from August 1986 and August 2011 illustrate areas where extensive urban growth is
clearly visible. All images are courtesy of C. Huang, University of Maryland College Park
Introduction 9
close to urban centers. In many of these areas, seasonal homes that are primarily
used for recreation have been built at rapid rates.
3 Summary
A quarter century has passed since socialism collapsed in Eastern Europe. The
natural experiment that started in the late 1980s and early 1990s is not over, but
important phases have concluded, and major trends in land use are clear at this
point. The following chapters examine those major trends in more detail and pro-
vide a rich picture of the changes that occurred, and their underlying drivers.
Satellite image archives that captured the entire period from socialism to today,
especially the images recorded by the series of Landsat satellites provide the key
data source for most of the research findings reported here. Collaborations between
scientists from the region, and from Western countries have been key to monitor the
patterns of change, and identify the processes causing these changes. We, the
editors of this book, are grateful to the authors of the chapters, and all those who
contributed to research described therein. It is thanks to their efforts that so much
can be learned from what happened in Eastern Europe.
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Overview of Changes in Land Use
and Land Cover in Eastern Europe
Jan Feranec, Tomas Soukup, Gregory N. Taff, Premysl Stych

and Ivan Bicik
Abstract This chapter presents an analysis of land cover changes in Eastern

Europe between 1990 and 2006, assessed using CORINE (Co-ORdination of
INformation on the Environment) Land Cover (CLC) datasets. The plethora of
potential land cover change categories were condensed into seven categories of
major land use change processes: urbanization, agricultural intensification, agri-
cultural extensification, afforestation, deforestation, construction and management
of water bodies, and other changes. The amounts of each change category and their
spatial distributions are summarized, and the change categories were also mapped
to show the relative amounts of change (per 3 3 km2) between 1990 and 2000
and between 2000 and 2006. The results showed that while more afforestation than
deforestation was observed in the first period, the reverse was true in the second
period, when deforestation outpaced afforestation. Urbanization and suburbaniza-
tion were major processes in Eastern Europe, particularly around existing major
cities, and the speed of this process generally increased from the first to the second
period. Both the intensification and extensification of agriculture were common
J. Feranec (&)
Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geography, Bratislava, Slovakia
e-mail: feranec@savba.sk
T. Soukup
GISAT, Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: tomas.soukup@gisat.cz
G.N. Taff
Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, Ås, Norway
e-mail: gregory.taff@nibio.no
P. Stych
Department of Applied Geoinformatics and Cartography, Faculty of Science,
Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: stych@natur.cuni.cz
I. Bicik
Department of Social Geography and Regional Development, Faculty of Science,
Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
e-mail: bicik@natur.cuni.cz
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 13

G. Gutman and V. Radeloff (eds.), Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes
in Eastern Europe after the Collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42638-9_2
14 J. Feranec et al.
during both periods, but a larger effect was observed in the first period. Overall,
land use changes were highest in central Europe and the Baltic countries and lowest
in southeast Europe.
1 Introduction
The collapse of socialism in 1989 caused massive socio-economic and institutional

changes (Prishchepov et al. 2013). This event has affected landscapes throughout
Russia and Central and East European satellite states. This chapter addresses land
cover (LC) changes in Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2006. First, a brief
overview of previous studies on LC changes in Eastern Europe is provided here.
The landscape of Eastern Europe has experienced significant changes in grass-
land cover. Cremene et al. (2005) reported a significant recent reduction in
Steppe-like grasslands in Eastern Europe. In Central Eastern Europe, including the
Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and the Slovak Republic, the main types of
landscape changes were urbanization/industrialization, intensification of agricul-
ture, extensification of agriculture, afforestation, deforestation, enlargement of areas
of extraction (exhaustion) of natural resources, and other anthropogenic changes
according to an analysis overlaying CORINE Land Cover (CLC) data with Landsat
MSS (Multispectral Scanner) imagery corresponding to the late 1970s and visually
observing the differences between CLC1990 and the 1970s imagery (Feranec et al.
2000). However, at the local scale, certain processes dominated. For example, along
the Czech Republic-Austria border, afforestation prevailed from 1990 to 2000
(Kupkova et al. 2013). In the Czech Republic, the increase in forest areas is rela-
tively permanent (an increase of 5 % during the 20th century), occurring in areas
that are not as well suited for agriculture, i.e., in sub-mountain and mountain areas
(Bičík et al. 2010).
While forest degradation, i.e., the partial extraction of timber and other goods
from forests, was a common process in East Europe during the post-Soviet period,
afforestation was generally widespread throughout the majority of the region since
the fall of socialism (Taff et al. 2010). One major reason for afforestation was the
abandonment of farmland, which was common throughout Central and Eastern
Europe, according to an analysis of 250-m MODIS 8-day NDVI composites
(Alcantara et al. 2013). Similarly, high rates of land abandonment were observed in
northeastern Europe between 1990 and 2000, according to an analysis of
Landsat TM data (Prishchepov et al. 2012). Baumann et al. (2012) used a com-
bination of summer and winter Landsat images to analyze forest changes in
European Russia and observed substantial regional variation, with an overall forest
loss between 1990 and 1995 and an overall forest gain between 2005 and 2010.
However, there were significant differences between countries in Eastern Europe in
terms of their abandonment rates after the collapse of the Soviet Union
(Prishchepov et al. 2012; Alcantara et al. 2013), indicating a strong influence of
state-level institutional factors. Kuemmerle et al. (2006) also observed significant
Overview of Changes in Land Use and Land Cover in Eastern Europe 15
differences in land use (LU) changes between some countries within the Carpathian
Mountains (Poland, Slovakia, and Ukraine). Kuemmerle et al. (2008) observed that
drivers of LU changes also considerably varied between neighboring countries in
the Carpathian region. Kozak (2003); Kozak et al. (2007a, b) investigated the main
trends and drivers of LU/LC changes in the Carpathian Basin; afforestation and a
decrease of arable land were the main long-term trends observed in these studies.
In addition to documenting the patterns of LU changes in general, it is partic-
ularly important to understand the drivers and consequences of recent LU and LC
changes in this region resulting from the massive socio-economic perturbations that
occurred after the fall of socialism (Prishchepov et al. 2010; Hostert et al. 2011).
Key drivers of changes in LU patterns in former socialist countries included
(1) country-specific land policies relating to the legal attitude towards private land
ownership, (2) transferability of land, and (3) land allocation/redistribution strate-
gies (Lerman et al. 2004). Macours and Swinnen (2000) investigated the changes in
agriculture production and associated causes in Central and Eastern Europe during
the transition period and observed that the primary involves deterioration in the
terms of agriculture trade, transition uncertainties, and extreme weather events.
During the period from 1990 to 2004, the Czech Republic experienced a significant
increase in grassland areas, a process deeply influenced by the termination of
significant subsidies given by the socialist state, which ended at the beginning of the
1990s (Bičík et al. 2010).
This chapter presents an overview of landscape changes (spatial distribution and
intensity) in Eastern European countries based on CLC during the periods from
1990–2000 to 2000–2006 and describes a useful a mapping methodology for
presenting landscape changes on a macro-scale.
2 Methodology
We quantified basic input information concerning recent LC changes in Central and

Eastern Europe for 17 countries: Albania (AL), Bosnia/Herzegovina (BA), Bulgaria
(BG), Croatia (HR), Czech Republic (CZ), Estonia (EE), Hungary (HU), Kosovo (KV),
Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), Macedonia FYR (MK), Monte Negro (ME), Poland (PL),
Romania (RO), Serbia (RS), Slovakia (SK) and Slovenia (SI). We considered two time
periods, 1990–2000 and 2000–2006, and analyzed the changes based on the CLC
database. The change data layers CLC1990–2000 and 2000–2006 are available at
http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gis/, and details concerning these data are provided in
Nunes de Lima (2005) and Feranec et al. (2007). A summary of the LC classes
included in the change databases CLC1990/2000 and 2000/2006 is shown in Table 1.
We derived the main landscape changes for the second level of CLC classes after
applying the conversion table (Table 2). This conversion table, i.e., the “matrix of
changes”, groups LC changes of the same type. There are 15 14 = 210 possible
combinations of one-to-one changes between the 15 CLC classes at the second
level (Feranec et al. 2010).
Table 1 CLC nomenclature (Heymann et al. 1994; Bossard et al. 2000)

Table 2 Conversion table (Feranec et al. 2010) for all of Eastern and Central Europe
2000 classes
1990 classes 11 12 13 14 21 22 23 24 31 32 33 41 42 51 52
11 0 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7
12 7 0 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7
13 7 7 0 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 6 7
14 7 7 7 0 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 6 7
21 1 1 1 1 0 2 3 3 4 4 7 7 7 6 7
22 1 1 1 1 3 0 3 3 4 4 7 7 7 6 7
23 1 1 1 1 2 2 0 2 4 4 7 7 7 6 7
24 1 1 1 1 2 2 3 0 4 4 7 7 7 6 7
31 1 1 1 1 5 5 5 5 0 5 5 5 7 6 7
32 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 4 0 5 7 7 6 7
33 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 4 4 0 7 7 6 7
41 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 4 4 7 0 7 6 7
42 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 4 4 7 7 0 6 7
51 1 1 1 1 7 7 7 7 4 4 7 7 7 0 7
52 1 1 1 1 7 7 7 7 4 4 7 7 7 7 0
1—urbanization (industrialisation), 2—intensification of agriculture, 3—extensification of
agriculture, 4—afforestation, 5—deforestation, 6—water bodies construction and management,
7—other changes (recultivation, dump sites, unclassified changes, etc.)
We grouped these 210 potential land use/cover change (LUCC) classes into
seven major LU change processes:
– Urbanization: represents changes in agriculture (CLC classes 21, 22 and 23;
codes are explained in Table 1), forest lands (classes 31, 32, and 33), wetlands
(classes 41 and 42) and water bodies (51 and 52) into urbanized land (the
construction of buildings designed for living, education, health care, recreation
and sport) and industrialized land (the construction of facilities for production,
all forms of transportation and electric power generation).
– Intensification of agriculture: represents the transition of LC types associated
with lower intensity use (e.g., from natural areas—classes 32, 33, except forest
class 31 and wetland class 4) into higher intensity agricultural use (classes 21
and 22).
– Extensification of agriculture: represents the transition of LC types from a
higher intensity agricultural use (classes 21 and 22) to a lower intensity agri-
cultural use (classes 23 and 24).
– Afforestation: represents forest regeneration, i.e., the establishment of forests by
planting and/or natural regeneration in other natural areas or agricultural lands
(change of classes 21, 22, 23, 24, 33, 41, and 42 into classes 31 and 32).
– Deforestation: involving forestland (class 31) changes into another LC or
damaged forest (classes 21, 22, 23, 24, 32, 33 and 41).
– Construction and management of water bodies (abbreviated: Water bodies

construction): involving the change of mainly agricultural (classes 21, 22, 23
and 24) and forest land (classes 31 and 32) into water bodies and the conse-
quences of the management of water resources and the water surface area of
reservoirs (Haines-Young and Weber 2006).
– Other changes: includes changes resulting from various anthropogenic activities,
such as the recultivation of former mining areas, dump sites, unclassified
changes, etc. More detailed characteristics of these changes are listed in Feranec
et al. (2010).
The size of the changed area is generally too small to present on a map showing
all of Central Europe (e.g., the smallest identified change area in the frame of the
CLC mapping is 5 ha.). A practical solution for how to “visualize” such small areas
of change is the presentation of the intensity/rate using a regular grid pattern.
Consistent with Feranec et al. (2010), we used a 3 3 km grid as a compromise
between the actual spatial distribution of the seven above-mentioned changes and
their presentations on the Central European level at a meaningful scale. To this end,
we first defined the mean LUCC value for the region for each of the seven LUCC
types. For each LUCC type, the mean LUCC value represents the mean percent area
of each 3 3 km2 square covered by that LUCC type, taken only among
3 3 km2 squares in which the LUCC type occurred. For each LUCC type, the
mean LUCC value utilized in the map represents a ratio of the area of that LUCC
type (in the whole study area) to the summed area of all squares of the 3 3 km
grid in which such changes occurred (i.e., the denominator is 9 km2 the number
of squares in which that LUCC type exists). The mean value of each LUCC type in
both periods is listed in Table 3.
We mapped each of the seven types of changes in each of the two time periods
(between 1990–2000 and 2000–2006) to show how these changes differed. We
compared the LUCC types between the two time periods for each square. We
assigned each square a red color when the percentage of the changed region
remained steady or increased between the two time periods or a blue color when the
percentage of the changed region decreased between the two time periods (Figs. 1,
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7) as follows:
Table 3 Mean values of 1990–2000 (%) 2000–2006 (%)

each LUCC type in both
periods Urbanization 1.7 2.0
Intensification 3.5 2.9
Extensification 5.0 3.7
Afforestation 1.7 2.0
Deforestation 3.5 2.5
Water bodies construction 2.2 1.6
Other changes 3.1 2.4
Note these means are defined as the mean percent area of each
3 3 km2 square covered by that LUCC type, taken only among
3 3 km2 squares in which that LUCC type occurred
Fig. 1 Spatial distribution of urbanization in Central Europe for the periods 1990–2000 and
2000–2006
Fig. 2 Spatial distribution of intensification in Central Europe for the periods 1990–2000 and
2000–2006
Fig. 3 Spatial distribution of extensification in Central Europe for the periods 1990–2000 and
2000–2006
Fig. 4 Spatial distribution of afforestation in Central Europe for the periods 1990–2000 and
2000–2006
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The night of no
moon
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The night of no moon
Author: H. B. Fyfe
Illustrator: Paul Orban
Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71530]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT

OF NO MOON ***
The Night of No Moon
By H. B. FYFE
Illustrated by ORBAN
A rough planet, Boyd III—where survival of the

fittest gave way to survival of the worst tempered!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Infinity June 1957.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The main trouble with the planet Boyd III was one satellite too many.
Had there been no third moon, large and close, the tides might have
been less confused and the weather more predictable. Certain peaks
of atmospheric wildness, recurrent coastal catastrophes, logical but
distressing customs of the natives—lack of these factors would have
made Boyd III a much more attractive world.
The same lack, however, would not have tempted Pete Guthrie to
survey such conditions from the surface of the planet as part of his
exploratory and mapping duties. But it was too late now to be sorry
he had not secured his rocket properly against the incredible tides of
the shoreline he had rashly chosen for a landing.
He mentioned this, for about the hundredth time, to Polf.
"Huh! Cables! Braces! No matter when wind-spirits want you,"
retorted the local humanoid, darting a cowed glance at the sky from
beneath his heavy brow-ridge. "They want you stay, we will keep
you."
"And I'll be stuck with you forever! Don't you have to make a living?"
"I am appointed. Like Retho, who sleeps at your door in the nights."
Guthrie scowled and examined the sky. It was a clear blue. One of
the moons, named Jhux, was a yellow-white disk, faintly blurred at
the edge by its thin envelope of air. The spacer wished he had
remained on Jhux to do his observing. With an oxygen mask, a man
could be fairly comfortable there.
The clear blue sky above him, on the other hand, would be a
fearsome sight in a month or so when the storms closed in.
"It is good some spoke for you," said Polf, nodding in quiet
satisfaction.
Guthrie frowned at him. Every so often, his companion's thought
pattern eluded him. The Skirkhi, as they named themselves, used a
typically developed humanoid language, and he had managed to
learn enough for communication. It was the way they thought that
baffled him.
"Last season was not as bad as some," continued Polf, staring over
the flat plain from their trifling eminence on the hill. "Elders say living
will be hard this storm. It is a time of heat."
Guthrie also stared off into the distance, toward the seacoast beyond
the plain. He tried to show no expression, for he suspected that
these people were cunning at reading faces.
His looks, to be sure, must be a handicap to them. He was long and
lean of face where they tended to be round and pudgy. His reddish
hair and blue eyes were certainly outside their experience, for they
had aroused much frightened comment when he had first been
discovered near his landing site.
He turned his head slowly to study Polf. The Skirkh crouched with
bowed legs folded under him and his big head thrust forward. His
profile was flat against the blue sky, for his nose was a wide-nostriled
snout. The eyes that gazed moodily at the horizon were black glints
between brow and cheek ridges.
The lower part of the native's face, though the chin receded,
completed the design of blunt, durable strength. It symbolized,
Guthrie reflected, Skirkhi life. The delicate had simply not survived
on this world.
On the other hand, Polf was not very large compared to the Terran.
Guthrie guessed him to be an inch or two over five feet, although his
squat, straddling stance made the estimate a rough one.
I wouldn't have much trouble with him, Guthrie thought. Of course,
the whole gang would be something else....
The village of two hundred was part of a tribe of six or seven times
that number. There were other tribes in surrounding areas, but
Guthrie had learned little about them. The Skirkhi said they were evil
people. He assumed that that meant they treated prisoners with the
same eager cruelty he had seen his captors display.
I should complain! he reproved himself. If not them, it might have
been me. I wonder when the Service will check about the reports I'm
not sending?
"Gaah!" exclaimed Polf, springing half erect and assuming a bare-
toothed posture of defense.
His naturally tan face flushed to an alarming coppery hue, a process
Guthrie had previously observed when village arguments came to
blows.
The flaring light streaked deliberately across the sky, pulsing
repeatedly, and descended in a direction Guthrie fancied was
southeast.
He realized that he, too, had risen at the sight. He turned to follow
the vapor trail in the sky, and noticed that the lower end wavered
erratically.
"That's no meteor!" he muttered. "But look at the knot-heads! If they
land that way, they'll spread like a ton of boiling butter and I'll never
get away!"
He realized that Polf had scampered back after a few steps downhill,
and was now crouched at Guthrie's feet more like an animal than a
man. The Skirkh uttered a sound between a snarl and a whimper.
"Get up, Polf!" said Guthrie. "It's a spaceship. I told you what mine
was like. Go tell the elders! They will think well of the bearer of such
news."
Polf bobbed his thick head and took a step downhill. Then duty
halted him.
"Oh, all right; I'll come with you," sighed Guthrie. "Maybe they'll
appoint us to lead the search if you tell them there will be other
Terrans."
He hoped that there would be other live Terrans. Even more, he
hoped that their ship would be in good condition. He was good and
tired of Boyd III.
Two days later, about noon, a sound of excited voices approaching
roused Guthrie and his shadow, neither of whom had been permitted
to join the search. They sat up, where they had been sunning
themselves on the roof of their house.
"They're back," exclaimed Guthrie, poking Polf eagerly.
Then, as he caught sight of two taller figures with the search party,
he slid down from the roof and started to run as soon as he hit the
ground.
Polf let out a squeak and tumbled in pursuit. By the time Guthrie and
his shadow reached the end of the single, irregular street boasted by
the village, the new arrivals had been surrounded by half of the
population.
At first, Guthrie found his approach deliberately blocked by several of
the village elders.
"What do you fear in this moment?" he snarled in Skirkhi, as he
shoved his way through the inner ranks. "Who else will tell you what
they say?"
He managed to jab old Kilki on the side of his thick skull with one
elbow, a limited satisfaction because Kilki ranked only about fourth in
the Council of Elders. Guthrie wished he could get at Thyggar, who
had ruled that he be kept inside one of the cramped stone huts for
several weeks following his capture.
Kilki rubbed the knobby side of his head philosophically and said,
"How we know they are not good spirits called to steal you back to
the sky, Gut'rie?"
"Huh!" snorted the Terran, pointing to the disheveled pair with the
search party. "They don't look like good spirits to me!"
"That is what you say," grunted Kilki. "Maybe we burn—then be
sure!"
The man was Guthrie's height or an inch taller, and broad of
shoulder. He had a strong face with bold, regular features slightly
spoiled by a thick stub of a nose. High cheekbones gave his eyes a
masked expression. Though sweat-darkened, his hair appeared to
be blond and wavy.
The girl did not stare at Guthrie with the same blend of irritation and
expectancy. Instead, her gray eyes shone with a trusting relief that
caused the spacer to grimace uncomfortably. He thought she was
probably pretty, if a trifle thin, but could not be sure. Somewhere on
the way—he guessed in the marsh about a mile south of the village
—she had fallen flat in the mud.
"Who'n'ell are these monkeys?" demanded the man. "I couldn't get
anything out of them except signals to go faster."
He almost succeeded in controlling a querulous note in his voice by
trying to assume the buddy-to-buddy tone of one Terran discussing
with another the universal peculiarity of aborigines. He watched
Guthrie carefully.
"What did you come down in?" asked the latter abruptly.
The other stared. The girl, who had been sagging wearily against the
stocky form of the nearest Skirkh, straightened up with a hurt look.
"It was an emergency rocket of the Mount Pico. Mr. Trent piloted it
down here after the others ... passed on ... from their burns—"
"Explosion and fire just before we were to pass this system on the
way to Altair," explained Trent rapidly. He had retreated from hope to
a worried expression. "I don't know what did it; they braked from
interstellar drive to give the rockets a chance at these planets. It all
went pretty fast."
"Then there's no ship to pick us up from this mudball?"
Trent glanced at the jostling Skirkhi, then at Guthrie. His brow
furrowed.
"Well, of course the government and the spaceline will send ships to
search this volume of space. I think the crew got off a message...."
"Aw, hell!" grunted Guthrie contemptuously.
Trent's voice trailed off. Then, ignoring Guthrie's scowl, he tried to
pick up where he had left off.
"... but I thought, perhaps ... couldn't you send a message about us?"
Guthrie regarded the crowd of Skirkhi, who gaped back with
gleaming eyes and hanging jaws. Old Thyggar raised a thick, four-
fingered hand at him and demanded, "What do they say?"
"Later, Old One," retorted Guthrie, turning to look at the girl.
"Oh—this is Miss Norsund," Trent explained. "Listen, if you don't
want to send a message, couldn't you have some of these people
guide us?"
"First," said Guthrie, "travel is dangerous. You might get eaten or
made into window-flaps. Secondly, I don't know where they could
guide you to."
He let them absorb that, then went on.
"And I can't send any message because I don't know the right spells
and incantations to summon any good spirits to carry the message."
Trent and Miss Norsund began to develop glassy stares.
"And finally," growled Guthrie, "they won't let me send a spirit
message because they're saving me for the first night with no moon!"
A subdued chattering sprang up among the Skirkhi when they heard
his voice rise to a shout. Guthrie controlled his accumulated
frustration with an effort. Meeting the girl's shocked glance, he felt a
twinge, and knew he had better stop.
"Are they good spirits?" demanded old Thyggar impatiently.
"Ask them, Old One!" said Guthrie, turning on his heel.
He seized the unguarded moment to jab the heel of his hand under
the short chin of the nearest Skirkh, propelling the latter against his
fellows. Through the narrow way thus cleared, the spacer stalked out
of the crowd.
"Thyggar wear sour look," mumbled Polf, trotting doggedly at his
heels.
He sounded more respectful than at any time during the day. Guthrie
reminded himself to watch out. He seemed to be earning too much
admiration; it might be wiser to slack off before it drew retaliation.
Through experience, he was learning to keep the score even, but....
Polf somehow managed to trip him as he turned into the doorway of
the house assigned to him. He plunged through the low, dark
entrance head first, displacing a crude but sturdy bench someone
had left in the way.
"Your father was undoubtedly a good spirit who stole your mother's
wits with a dream of soft summers," said Guthrie, sitting up just in
time to thrust a boot between Polf's ankles.
The Skirkh sprawled in his turn upon the hard-packed floor. The two
of them sat there for a long moment, raising both palms in the ritual
gesture to the sky spirits and glaring at each other in mutual respect.
On the second morning after the arrival of Trent and Miss Norsund,
Guthrie judged the time ripe for a longer talk.
When he and Polf approached the hut in which the newcomers were
quartered, signs of obstructionism appeared; but the spacer sneered
them down. By the time he found himself seated on the ground
facing Trent and the girl, the onlookers had been reduced to Polf and
a trio of glum guards. The former seemed to take pleasure in his
comrades' loss of face.
"Sorry I took so long," Guthrie apologized. "There's a certain act you
have to put on around here. They been treating you all right?"
He looked at the girl as he spoke, reflecting that a little cleaning up
had improved her immeasurably. With the mud off, she displayed a
glowing complexion and a headful of chestnut curls; and Guthrie was
no longer sure she was too thin. He determined to check the first
time she stood up in the short, borrowed dress of Skirkhi leather.
"Look here, Guthrie—that is your name, isn't it?" Trent asked
peevishly.
"That's right. Pete Guthrie, currently employed, I hope, by the
Galactic Survey. And you two are Trent and Norsund?"
"George Trent and Karen Norsund, yes. But what I want to say is
that we find your attitude very strange. How can we expect co-
operation from the natives if you throw your weight around the way
you do?"
"And what," asked Karen Norsund, turning her big gray eyes on
Guthrie, "was that remark about the natives saving you from
something?"
"It's for something. I think I'd better tell you the local superstitions."
"If you don't mind," Trent interrupted, "I'd rather know how far it is to
a Terran settlement. We tried to treat the crowd like humans after
you left, but we'd prefer not to stay here until a rescue ship arrives."
"As far as I know," said Guthrie, "we are the only Terrans on this
planet."
He watched that sink in for a few moments, then explained how the
system had fallen within the volume of space allotted to him for
general survey, how it had never before aroused any great interest
beyond being noted in the Galactic Atlas for the benefit of space
travelers in just such a situation as theirs.
"I hope your rocket is in good shape," he finished. "Did you land
well?"
"Oh ... well enough," said Trent. "What about it? Why not stay here
until we think a rescue ship is near, then go back and televise for
help?"
"It's not that easy," said Guthrie. "If this ship we're hoping for stops to
scout for other survivors, we'll be in a real unhealthy situation."
They looked puzzled.
"The seasons here," he explained, "tend to wild extremes. They have
tidal waves you wouldn't believe. In a few weeks, the storms will
begin and the Skirkhi will go to the hills to dig in. It's a bad time to be
caught in the open."
"Oh, come, man!" Trent snapped. "We shouldn't be here that long."
"It's only two or three weeks. The trouble is that on a certain night
shortly before they leave the village to the mercy of the sky spirits,
the Skirkhi have a nasty custom—"
"I don't care about your low opinion of the local customs," interrupted
Trent. "From what I've seen of you, Guthrie, it is obvious that you are
not the sort to represent Terra on the frontiers. Just tell me—if you
can't get along with the natives like a civilized being, where do you
expect to get?"
"Up to Jhux," said Guthrie.
"Where?"
"Jhux, the largest moon. It has a thin atmosphere. We could pump
enough air into your rocket to live on, and wait to signal any
approaching ship."
"But why go to all that trouble?"
"Besides," Karen Norsund put in, "I think I've had enough travel in a
small rocket for the time being."
"It'll be better than the hurricanes here," Guthrie sighed. "Now, if
you'll just let me finish about the Skirkhi—"
Trent screwed up his face in exasperation until his eyes were slits
above his cheekbones. He shrugged to Karen in a way that turned
Guthrie's neck red.
"All right!" the latter choked out. "You seem to want to make me look
narrow-minded! Wait till you know the Skirkhi! They believe very
seriously in these sky spirits. They try to buy them off, to save the
village and their own skins—and they pay in blood!"
He waited for the shocked exclamations, the suspicion, then the
exchange of glances that agreed to further consideration.
"Until you two came along, I was the goat. Now there are three of us
to choose from, but your rocket gives us the means to make a run for
it."
They thought that over for a few minutes.
"How do you know they won't ... use ... all three of us?" shuddered
Karen.
"The Skirkhi have learned to be frugal. They'll save something for
next season. Otherwise, they'd have to raid some other tribe or elect
one of them."
"But, before then, either a rescue ship or one from the Survey will
have arrived, don't you think?" suggested Trent.
"What are you getting at?"
"Well ... this: assuming that you are not exaggerating your distrust of
the natives, if they actually feel it necessary to ... er ... sacrifice to
these sky spirits, that will still leave the remaining two of us a good
chance."
Guthrie wiped a hand slowly over his face. He glanced out of the
corner of his eye at Polf and the Skirkhi guards, wondering if they
could guess the drift of the conversation.
"And what will your next idea be?" he demanded bitterly. "Want us to
draw straws to see which of us goes out and commits hara-kiri for
them?"
"Now, now! We must be realistic. After all, nothing serious may come
of this. Merely because you and the natives share a mutual antipathy
—"
"You make me sick!" growled Guthrie, rising to his feet.
"I don't know what you mean."
"But I know what you're figuring," said the spacer. "The excuse will
be that you're willing to take your chance with the Skirkhi choice, or
that you don't want to stir up trouble because of the girl; but actually
you think I'm the natural candidate!"
"Mr. Guthrie!" exclaimed Karen, jumping up.
"Pardon me! I have to go and commune with the spirits of the sky!"
He pivoted toward the street and bounced off one of the guards who
had crept closer to eavesdrop. Automatically, he shoved the Skirkh
into the wall.
Behind him, he heard a muttered curse in Skirkhi, then another thud
as a thick skull clunked yet again into the wall. He deduced that Polf
was following both his footsteps and his example.
They walked out toward the hill where he and Polf had sat the day
the rocket had flared down from the sky. Two pale crescents hovered
on the horizon.
"There will still be Yiv in the night," muttered Polf, "but soon he will
follow Jhux and there will be no moon. Then come storms."
Guthrie recalled his surprise at the natives' awareness of Yiv, a small
satellite whose distance made it appear merely an enormous star.
He had noted it from space, but they must have realized its nature
from regular observation.
They walked a few minutes, when Polf peered slyly at him.
"I think these sky ones good spirits, not like you."
"What do you mean?" asked the other suspiciously.
"When in hard talk, you get red in face almost like human. They not.
The she-spirit a little, yes. But the other ... I think he is best spirit of
all!"
"Aw, what do you know about Terrans?" demanded Guthrie
uncertainly.
"What are Terrans?" Polf leered at the effort to take him in by a trick
name. "You, Gut'rie, you act like us. You learn fear evil spirits like
smart man. Maybe was trick of good ones—send you here so we
make mistake."
Guthrie stared down at the stocky Skirkh, trying to follow that chain
of thought and wondering how many in the village would find it
logical.
Most of them, I'm afraid, he thought. I wonder ... what if I just kept
quiet and let him dig his own grave? If I read Trent right, he'll do it!
They sat for a while on the crest of the low hill, in the warmth of the
sun. Polf seemed not to mind Guthrie's brooding. Patience was a
Skirkhi forte. At times, the spacer pitied the natives, with their harsh
and precarious life.
Maybe something could be done here, he reflected. A good,
thorough survey would tell. After all, G. S. engineers have controlled
temperatures on some planets by diverting a few ocean currents.
And there's cloud-seeding....
"Huh!" he grunted. "Already thinking as if I were safe on Jhux."
He began to question Polf as to what the search party had reported,
and derived a good idea of the route to the rocket. Tortuous details of
Skirkhi trail directions baffled him every few minutes, so that it was
twilight before he was satisfied that he could find the craft on his
own. With Polf trailing, he strolled thoughtfully to his quarters,
bracing for supper of fish or lizard.
At intervals during the next three days, he saw the new couple about
the village. Trent, especially, did not seem eager to speak to him,
and they were always accompanied by at least one Skirkhi couple.
In a moment of relaxation, Guthrie permitted himself to observe
Karen with pleasure, when she appeared in her own clothes. With
the mud washed out, it became apparent that she had been wearing
a smart pair of lounging pajamas when interrupted by the
spaceliner's alarm.
Trent had also cleaned his sport shirt and baggy slacks, and now
went about making himself buoyantly pleasant to the natives. Once
or twice, turning away from this spectacle with a frown, Guthrie
chanced to encounter the black, analytical stare of old Thyggar. A
sardonic grin quirked the elder's wide mouth.
"Retho tell me Trent learn speak Skirkhi fast," Polf reported, glittering
eyes nearly hidden by the contortion that passed for a smile on
Skirkhi faces, "so he can tell what a good man he is. He says is kind.
He says is friend. You would laugh, Gut'rie—he call you names!"
"So will he laugh," growled Guthrie, "on the other side of his face.
He's begging for it, all right."
He chewed his lip for a moment, then shrugged. With a nod to Polf,
he started down the street to the huts assigned to Trent and Karen.
He found the girl behind the squat stone house, doing her best to
comb out a mop of freshly washed chestnut hair.
"You'd do better to leave some mud in it," he advised her.
This drew a hard gray stare. Guthrie turned to Polf.
"Can't you do something with this one sitting beside her?" he
demanded.
Polf grinned, showing a sturdy set of broad teeth.
"It would be like sacrifice to those who sent down these others," he
said. "Last night, when leaving Retho at your door, I kill chivah lizard
in street. With club. But was only a little blood and we are full of
thanks."
After a few minutes of conversation under the glowering gaze of the
Terran girl, he enticed the Skirkhi woman around the corner toward
the entrance of the hut. Guthrie turned to Karen.
"Listen!" he said urgently. "What is this I hear about Trent going
around like a cock-eyed good-will ambassador?"
"I can't help what he does," Karen said defensively. She had trouble
meeting his eye. "I told him I didn't think he should talk that way, but
he said ... well ... that you—"
"I can imagine," said Guthrie. "Well, he'd better stop it, and not on my
account. This is a queer, dangerous place."
He took a few steps to the corner of the hut, to check that the space
between adjoining houses was empty of spies. The guards loitered
in the street.
"It may sound strange," he continued, "but it makes a distorted kind
of sense for people who live on a planet like Boyd III—this belief in
sky spirits. I told you about the bad season, I think, and the uproar
raised by coinciding tides."
Karen, having brushed her hair into some sort of order, eyed him
watchfully.
"I would expect them to protect themselves from the rains," she
remarked.
"Rains!" snorted Guthrie. "You don't know! Hurricanes! Tidal waves!
Floods! They lose people every storm. This is a very bad place to
live. So what do you suppose they worship?"
"Sky spirits, you keep telling me."
"Yes," he said, lowering his voice instinctively. "But not good ones,
naturally—spirits of evil."
Karen looked at him sidelong and clucked her tongue.
"It's not funny; it's perfectly logical. They spend their lives one jump
ahead of freezing or drowning. Their world's against them. Other
savage races have figured it that way, even on Terra."
"All right, it's logical. What has it to do with us?"
"It has this to do," said Guthrie. "That clown, Trent, is going around
making friends like a puppy. He's cutting his own throat, an' I'd bet he
thinks he's cutting mine. But you don't think they'd sacrifice a bad
person, do you?"
The thought penetrated, and she rose slowly to her feet. He reached
out to her shoulders and gave her a little shake.
"The Skirkhi spend weeks before the stormy season making sure the
evil spirits notice what nasty people they are. Like Terran kids before
Christmas, in reverse. And there's that apple-polisher making a
gilded saint of himself while the natives are spitting in their friends'
faces and trying to steal their wives or cheat old Thyggar on their
taxes."
The girl stared at him in horror. The flesh of her shoulders was soft
but firm under his fingers. He suddenly wished there were no Skirkhi
hanging about.
Suddenly, Karen's gray eyes widened with a new wariness.
"Let go!" she ordered.
"Maybe I shouldn't," Guthrie teased her. "Maybe I ought to let the
Skirkhi see that you have claws. It would help your reputation here."
She began to struggle, and he had a hard time holding her but
somehow hated to let go. He was conscious of a padding of feet in
the alleyway as a couple of guards drifted in from the street.
Karen tried kicking him in the shin, then wound the fingers of one
hand in his hair and yanked. Guthrie, who had by then clasped both
hands in the small of her back, let go with his left to grab her wrist.
Immediately, the nails of her other hand raked past his right eye.
He muttered a curse, let go completely as he felt a sudden fury well
up in him, then grabbed a handful of her long hair in his left hand. He
half raised his other hand, undecided whether to slap or let her go.
She screwed up her face and tried to turn away.
"Guthrie!" shouted a man's voice.
Trent ran between the huts, trailed by a score of Skirkhi.
Well, this ought to be it, thought Guthrie, releasing the girl. He can't
let this pass. I suppose I have a poke in the snoot coming.
Trent hauled Karen aside protectively, frowning at Guthrie. The latter
stood with his hands waist-high, shoulders slightly forward, waiting.
Watching Trent's eyes, he saw them flicker toward the expectant
Skirkhi.
"I realize that there can be only one explanation, Guthrie," said the
other, "but this is obviously neither the time nor place to argue it."
"I didn't offer any explanation," said Guthrie, ashamed but irritated.
"We are being observed," Trent reminded. "Show a little Terran
dignity!"
He raised his chin with dignity and Guthrie punched it as hard as he
could.
Thinking it over later, he realized that he had entirely wasted the

quick feint with his left. Trent was still posing as a saint when
Guthrie's fist sent him flying into the solid stone and clay wall of the
house behind him.
The spacer stared at Trent as the man slid limply down the wall to a
sitting position. He flexed his numbed fingers thoughtfully, as Trent
peered glassily up at him without seeming to know where he was.
Karen slipped behind a rank of thick-shouldered Skirkhi as a hum of
comment began to rise from the gathering. Guthrie turned and
pushed his way through to the street. Out of habit, he took the
direction to his quarters, vaguely aware that Polf had reappeared to
follow him.
Disgusted with himself, he tried to see Karen's side of it.
It must have looked just wonderful! he told himself. I think I might
have really tried it—guess she saw that in my face, so I can't blame
her for ducking. How could I? This place is getting me. Pretty soon,
I'll be a first-class Skirkh!
He kicked moodily at the dust outside his doorway, then climbed the
projecting stones at the corner. Polf grunted and followed him up to
the roof.
"He is too good," said the Skirkh. "It will be easy. I will do it for you
with Retho. My brother, Kror, will come too."
"Do what?" asked Guthrie.
"Steal his woman for you tonight. It will be a bad thing to do and the
best time to do it. Elders say no moon tonight."
"But what makes you think—?"
"Your face. Do not say to Polf you not want. And if you not admit she
is his woman, it is not bad enough a thing to do."
"You don't understand, Polf," said the spacer. "I couldn't ... that is, it's
not the same for me...." My God! he thought. I'm beginning to sound
like Trent!
"The storms come," murmured Polf. "You want the wrong spirits for
friends? If it is tonight, elders stay with Trent. Will be easy."
"Won't you have to be there? And your friends?"
"Gah!" exclaimed Polf. "Whole dumb village be there. What better
time to do bigger spirit work? You want Thyggar steal her first?"
Guthrie sat up abruptly, and almost slid from the roof.
"Well, why not?" he muttered after a moment. "She must have
warned Trent by now. If he can't think of a way out, I'd better save
what can be saved. That was his own idea. I can't help it if he
wouldn't listen to me."
It did not sound quite right to him, but time was running out. The
thought of being transformed lingeringly into a few pounds of hacked
and burnt meat crossed his mind once again, and he could feel
himself beginning to sweat. He glanced over his shoulder at the
broad, expectant face.
"All right," he whispered. "Tell Retho and your brother."
What else can I do? he asked himself. If it has to be one of us—
Later, he tried to convince himself that he could sleep for a few

hours.
Still later, following Polf down the torch-lit street, trying to look
nonchalant before the unusual gathering of Skirkhi, he asked himself
again, What else can I do? He avoided the amused glint in old
Thyggar's eyes.
The doing drove out the thought, and it was some hours before it
occurred to him again. When it did, he was stumbling up a pitch-
black slope miles to the south of the village.
Behind him, he could hear the sounds of panting and of dragging
footsteps as Karen, Polf, and two other Skirkhi followed. The slope
leveled off to a plateau. Something too big and solid to be a tree
loomed up against the horizon.
"There it is!" Guthrie gasped.
The darkness was relieved only slightly by the stars, but there was
no mistaking that silhouette. Guthrie stumbled the last hundred yards
and came to a halt beside one big fin.
He stretched out a hand and accounted for the others by touch as
they arrived. The rocket was canted slightly because one of the fins
had sunk a little way into the ground, and the hatch half-way up the
hull had been left open with the exit ladder extended to the surface.
"We'd better catch our wind before trying to climb up," he said.
He knelt on the grassy ground and rolled wearily over to a sitting
position.
"How could I do it?" he murmured.
"What? You speak wrong talk, Gut'rie," panted Polf. "Like you talk to
the good one before they start celebration. What you say to fool
him?"
"What does he say?" whispered Karen anxiously.
"Wants to know what I said to Trent," he answered, tugging the
frayed cuff of his trousers away from his leg. He seemed to be mud
to the knees.
"When you came along as he was getting ready for the ceremony?
You told him to dump the fancy costume and run for it."
"I did?" mused Guthrie. "Yes, I forgot. Well, he wouldn't listen, would
he?"
"No, and he wanted me to go with him. You got mad because he
thought they were taking him into the tribe."
"He's being taken, all right," muttered Guthrie. "There's no moon up
yet."
He crawled to his feet and groped through the dark to the ladder.
"What are you doing?" asked Karen.
"Gonna take a look. Hope there's fuel to bounce her off this
mudball."
He told Polf of his intention and began to climb. The metal rungs
were cold. Reaching the open airlock, he swung himself inside the
cramped chamber and closed the outer hatch in order to open the
inner. Lights came on automatically.
He found a shorter ladder inside and climbed up to the passenger
compartment. There were padded seats for about two dozen people,
well packed, but they had swung to an upright position for landing.
Guthrie climbed them to the pilot's position, where he seated himself
to look over the instruments.
"Whew!" he exclaimed. "This can has just enough to get along on."
After noting the amount of fuel left in the tanks, he searched the
drawers of the little control desk for information. He discovered a
booklet of data on the rocket and a set of simple charts. To these, he
added his memory of the mass calculated for Boyd III back when he
had facilities for such work.
"We ought to get off okay," he told himself. "My God! A hand-crank
calculator—they don't waste power in these things! Well ... later."
There was power provided, he saw, for "beacon" and "auto. radio" as
well as for a few essentials like ventilation. A distress call could be
broadcast automatically, at intervals regulated to economize on
power, and the same could be done with the beacon. He looked up
details in the booklet. The rocket possessed, at least, means to
make a loud noise and show a bright light if any rescuer should
approach. It remained for them to take it where these could be
effective.
He went to work calculating firing data to blast the rocket into a
course for Jhux. His figures lacked the polish he might have obtained
in his own ship, but anything would have to do in this pinch.
"Maybe I ought to figure a closed orbit," he muttered. "Once up, we
can pick the right time to edge out to Jhux ... maybe put out a few
signals first."
He stared reflectively at his arithmetic, chin in hand.
After several minutes, he leaned back and thought, Pete, my boy,
maybe you won't have to do it after all! There might just be an out if
there's still time.
He grabbed up the pencil he had been using and feverishly
undertook another course calculation. In the end, after making a few
corrections and comparing the requirements with the fuel gauges, he
decided it would be possible.
"Now, let's see ... how do I get a distress call taped and set for
broadcast...?"
When he scrambled down the ladder a little later, he brought a
flashlight with him. Karen squinted and the three Skirkhi cringed in its
beam.
"Polf, how long till day?" Guthrie demanded.
Polf found enough voice to guess that a third of the night remained.
Guthrie reached up and strained to unhook the ladder. As it came
loose, he let it fall and said, "Let's get out of here before the jets
light!"
"What are you doing?" protested the girl, grabbing his arm.
"Sending it up on automatic to broadcast a distress call."
"But I thought—"
"Well, I thought of a better one," snapped Guthrie. In Skirkhi, he
added, "Move your feet, worms, before we become a burning
sacrifice!"
Shoving the natives ahead and towing a Karen whose voice showed
signs of turning shrill, he got the group over the crest of the hill in
plenty of time before the sky flared and thundered with the sudden
roar of rockets.
The horrid noise departed toward the upper atmosphere. Presently,
Guthrie's eyes readjusted to the dark until he could make out the
trees through which they had groped and bumped heads an hour
earlier.
"Might as well start," he said. "We might make it back in time for
lunch."
"But the rocket!" wailed Karen. "After that awful trip to find it!"
"I set the controls," he explained, "to blast it up into an orbit around
the planet, where it can broadcast our location until we're picked up."
"Oh," said Karen. "Well, I hope you can handle your friends till then."
"We should be able to see it in a little while. I set the controls to flop
it over when it's high enough and send it around east to west."
"Why?"
"So it will match the apparent motions of the moons."
Karen walked perhaps twenty steps in silence, then stopped dead.
"Guthrie! Do you really mean we can see it?"
"Sure. I did it a bit roughly, but I'm hoping for under two thousand
miles and two or three periods a night. Even when it isn't catching
any sunlight, that beacon ought to show. Dimmer than Yiv, maybe,
but moving and easy to spot."
With the flashlight, making their way through the woods took less
time. They were half-way across a grassy plain when Polf exclaimed
and pointed to the sky. Guthrie whooped.
"There's a moon for tonight!" he yelled. "And every night, for quite
some time, until the pulls of the real ones spoil its orbit."
He felt so good that he threw an arm about Karen's waist. It must
have felt good to her, too, for instead of pulling away, she leaned
closer.
"They'll wait now, won't they?" she asked. "I mean, unless there's no
moon.... Wait till George finds out what you've done for him!"
"I don't know why I'm so good to him when I like the Skirkhi better,"
said Guthrie. "Of course, we can't explain until I think up a suitably
rotten excuse, or it would ruin my reputation with them!"
They stood motionless for a few minutes, watching the bright light
creep perceptibly along its path in the heavens.
"Is it Yiv?" asked Kror, puzzled. "It should not be, now."
"Gah!" exclaimed Polf. "You mud-head! Of course, it is not Yiv. Our
Gut'rie has made a new moon. Be grateful to Polf for bringing you,
for we shall be big in the village after this!"
He looked proudly at Guthrie. The latter turned off the flashlight to
see if the sky were actually beginning to show a pre-dawn lightening.
"We will be very big," Polf repeated. "Are we not friends of the evilest
spirit of them all?"
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT OF
NO MOON ***
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Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes in Eastern Europe After The Collapse of The Soviet Union in 1991 1st Edition Garik Gutman

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Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes in Eastern Europe After The Collapse of The Soviet Union in 1991 1st Edition Garik Gutman

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Land-Cover and Land-Use Changes in

Eastern Europe after the Collapse of the

Public Administration in Post Communist Countries

Land Use and Spatial Planning Enabling Sustainable

Drug Use for Grown Ups Chasing Liberty in the Land of

Telecoupling Exploring Land Use Change in a Globalised

Land and Society in Early South Asia Eastern India 400

The Land Shall Not Be Sold in Perpetuity The Jewish

Terrorism In The Cold War State Support In Eastern

Aspects of the Energy Union: Application and Effects of

Land-Cover and Land-Use

ISBN 978-3-319-42636-5 ISBN 978-3-319-42638-9 (eBook)

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature

Washington, DC, USA Garik Gutman

Agricultural Fires in European Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania

V.C. Radeloff and G. Gutman

V.C. Radeloff (&)

© Springer International Publishing (outside the USA) 2017 1

2 Major Land-Use Trends After the Collapse

2.1 Agricultural Changes

2.2 Forest Changes

Alcantara C, Kuemmerle T, Baumann M, Bragina EV, Grifﬁths P, Hostert P, Knorn J, Mueller D,

Ioffe G, Nefedova T (2000) Areas of crisis in Russian agriculture: a geographic perspective.

Jan Feranec, Tomas Soukup, Gregory N. Taff, Premysl Stych

Abstract This chapter presents an analysis of land cover changes in Eastern

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 13

The collapse of socialism in 1989 caused massive socio-economic and institutional

We quantiﬁed basic input information concerning recent LC changes in Central and

Table 1 CLC nomenclature (Heymann et al. 1994; Bossard et al. 2000)

– Construction and management of water bodies (abbreviated: Water bodies

Table 3 Mean values of 1990–2000 (%) 2000–2006 (%)

Title: The night of no moon

Illustrator: Paul Orban

Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71530]

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT

A rough planet, Boyd III—where survival of the

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Thinking it over later, he realized that he had entirely wasted the

Later, he tried to convince himself that he could sleep for a few

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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