Monitoring of land use by Ukrainian territorial communities in the conditions of martial law
Authors: Bubyr Natalia , Prasul Yuliia , Kulish Serhiy , Bachurina Dariia 
Published: December 2024

The purpose of this article. The purpose of the article is to show the importance and determine the priority directions for land use monitoring by Ukrainian territorial communities in the conditions of martial law, while giving some examples of practical implementation of these directions for Natalyne Territorial Community (TC) in Krasnohrad District, Kharkiv Region.

The main material. The article considers theoretical and methodological foundations of land use monitoring in Ukraine in the conditions of martial law. It includes the impact of martial law on the legal regulation of land relations in Ukraine, analysis of foreign experience in solving land use problems affected by military aggression. We selected the land fund of Natalyne TC in Kharkiv region as a territory of experimental research based on historical experience, existing capabilities of GIS and remote sensing technologies. Analyzing current trends in the land use development within EU countries, we formulated priority directions for land use monitoring of Ukrainian territorial communities. There are some examples of practical implementation of these directions for Natalyne TC in Kharkiv region.

In the conditions of martial law, the regulation of land relations in Ukraine underwent certain changes. These are: a) restrictions on free access to cartographic materials and services of the state land cadastre; b) a new regulation of certain land legal relations. This includes simplified transfer of unallocated agricultural land to be used in sowing campaign, exemption from liability for misuse of land in case of its involvement for country’ food security needs, etc.; c) adoption of some legislation caused by hostilities and/or their consequences, in particular , prohibition to change the purpose for former Kakhovka Reservoir lands.

The historical experience of the world’s leading countries, such as Canada, Great Britain, Germany and France, proves that real-time monitoring of land pollution with military-man-made substances during hostilities can significantly speed up the process of post-war land restoration. Nowadays, the level of GIS and remote sensing development allows us to carry out this monitoring in a remote mode, using it even in areas of intensive military operations. A prerequisite for monitoring is the available database of land plots in GIS format, which are part of a given territorial unit (community, district) and adjacent territories. The remote monitoring process itself involves updating this database with data on bombing sites and other information, cartographic visualization of affected/potentially affected lands, etc. If there is safe environment, we can clarify the obtained data during field monitoring studies.

In general,the proposed priority directions for land use monitoring of Ukrainian territorial communities in the conditions of martial law include: a) identification of hostilities and their consequences. This includes, in particular, presence of mines, delimitation of minefields, etc.; b) enhanced monitoring of critically important objects and places; c) verification of forest belts, hydrotechnical structures; d) monitoring of illegal land occupation, overgrowing and other manifestations of irrational land use; e) timely recording of misused land cases.

We tested our theoretical propositions on the territory of Natalyne TC in Kharkiv region. Its land fund is typical for the Ukrainian steppe natural zone: 79% of it is agricultural land, significantly less (about 9%) is forestry land, residential and public land accounts for 2% of the community’s land fund, and other lands, including industrial, energy, transport, etc., 9%. The lands of the nature reserve fund (Martyniv and Petrivka reserves) and the lands of the Kobziv and Zakhidno -Sosnovsk gas condensate fields, need enhanced monitoring.

Developed GIS database of Natalyne TC lands includes data about existing land use types within the community and adjacent territories, the location of gas wells, objects of the nature reserve fund. The total number of objects is more than 9000. During the monitoring, we added the places directly affected by hostilities and identified the manifestations of irrational land use.

The collected data is the necessary basis (information support) for the post-war renewal of the community’s territory, based on the concept of sustainable development and the principles of rational land use.

Conclusions and further research. The real-time land use monitoring of Ukrainian territorial communities in the conditions of martial law is caused by the necessity to timely record the impact of hostilities on their territory, to identify bombing sites, pollution with substances of military-man-made origin, which, as the experience of the world’s leading countries shows, will significantly speed up the process of post-war land restoration. At the same time, along with recording the impact of hostilities or its consequences, this monitoring should identify the manifestations of irrational land use, such as illegal land occupation, overgrowing, misuse of land, etc.

A prerequisite for monitoring is the creation a database of land plots in GIS format on the communities’ territory and adjacent lands, which contains quantitative and qualitative characteristics of lands, areas (objects) that require enhanced monitoring, in particular, critical infrastructure facilities, places of storage for chemical and other hazardous substances. The monitoring itself is the update of this database with information on the impact of hostilities and its consequences. On this basis, we created a GIS database for Natalyne TC (Krasnohrad district of Kharkiv region) land resources. This GIS database contains more than 9,000 objects.

In the future, this collected data will serve as a basis for the post-war renewal of the community’s territory. The prospective direction of our research is to categorize this database into two parts: 1) for official use by staff (in case of increasing cartographic data’s accuracy according to the requirements for land cadastral cartographic materials), 2) for public monitoring of the land use.