ИСТИНА

Agriculture restructuring during the last fifteen years have put severe strains on the agricultural production: degradation affects more than 70% of agricultural lands, many fields were abandoned or dramatically impacted by changed management practices. Agricultural intensification creates new threats to biodiversity, that includes plowing mostly of all tillable lands, increasing of soil erosion, overgrazing and pasture degradation, landscape fragmentation by the fields and infrastructure. A complex present-day landscapes methodology is used to study land use/cover changes in Russia under agricultural impact. The agrolandscapes’ applications were done at macroregional, regional and local scales on the base of cartographic, remote in-field data. The agrobiodiversity conservation and ecologically sound agriculture development should help to reconcile social needs with the requirements of the environment and to avoid the unfavorable consequences of land degradation.