Forest cover dynamics

After the fall of the USSR in 1991, one of the most significant and rapid changes in land use appeared during history of humankind. The population that previously inhabited rural areas fled the countryside, following a trend of rapid urbanization in major regional centers of the Baltics. The change from state-owned agricultural fields to private ownership, caused large areas of previously cultivated farmland to become abandoned. Creating largest artificially made carbon sink by abandoned farmland landscapes of former USSR, marking the end of the Stalin’s applied collective farming system.

Copernicus is a European system for monitoring the Earth, its pan-European component, coordinated by the European Environment Agency, has produced CORINE Land Cover (CLC) datasets from the period between 1990 and 2012. CLC is used to illustrate agricultural land use changes after 1990. Another tendency in land use changes in the Baltic states can be seen in forest cover. While overall former soviet countries are witnessing forest growth over abandoned territories, supporting carbon sink in locking and storing carbon dioxide, The Baltic states have the opposite phenomena of forest cover decrease since 1991. By new markets opening demand for timber products has radically increased, resulting in logging activities that have increased 3 fold for Estonia and even 4 fold for Latvia, compare to Soviet period. Very clearly this tendency can be seen in the period between 2006 and 2012, during which global economical crisis occurred, during which timber logging was reducing for most of the countries except the Baltics states.