The splitting up of large scale collective farming systems into private farms not only resulted in changes in cropping system but also in changes in field size. In many regions of Russia the area of agricultural land was reduced. The difficult ecological situation and the development of negative processes such as soil erosion, salinity and pollution result in degradation of soil and vegetation and this leads to serious problems in obtaining a sufficiently high agricultural production. As a result, one of the most important and urgent problems in Russia now is to improve land mangement and land use planning systems and to develop regional strategies and programmes aimed at increasing the agricultural production together with an efficient use of land resources. Based on methods as developed in Russia and in The Netherlands improved methods will be developed to monitor agricultural land use applying multi-sensor remote sensing techniques in combination with GIS techniques.
Main goal is the improvement of agricultural land use monitoring in Russia.
Secondly, it will be investigated whether the developed methodology can be applied for Europe. In the framework of this project, emphasis is not only on methodology development, but an important goal is to obtain a practical way for monitoring agricultural land use over large areas, such as Russia. It is a major goal to develop a methodology based on remote sensing with a much higher accuracy than traditional methods.