Grasslands cover a substantial part of the terrestrial land (White et al., 2000). One of the largest continuous grassland areas on Earth is the Eurasian steppe belt, which stretches from Bulgaria to Manchuria. This area was a cradle to many nomadic civilizations, and
Most of the steppes are still used for livestock production. Nowadays much of this area is ploughed as well (Lioubimtseva and Henebry, 2012; Kraemer et al., 2015). As most of Eurasian steppe belt lies within former Eastern Bloc-countries, significant land-use changes happened in the in the region in the 1990s following the breakdown of the Soviet Union, mostly involving agricultural abandonment (Alcantara et al., 2013; Prishchepov et al., 2013). A substantial part of the Eurasian steppe is located in the northern part of Kazakhstan.
Northern Kazakhstan is an interesting study region for a number of reasons. First, land-use changes of an unprecedented scale happened in that region during and after the Soviet period, potentially affecting other parts of the world, as has been outlined above (de Beurs and Henebry, 2004; Kraemer et al., 2015). Second, this area was largely understudied partly due to the existing gaps in satellite archives (Kovalskyy and Roy, 2013). Third, frequent and extensive fires in the area affect local as well as global environments (Loboda et al., 2012; McCarty et al., 2017; Smelyanskiy et al., 2015). Novel datasets and understanding the drivers of fire regimes are therefore of a paramount importance. Finally, the local government is seeking to intensify crop production and to revive livestock numbers, as well as wild ungulate populations in the region (Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2018; Nazarbayev, 2010), which requires datasets to facilitate managerial decisions in these regards.
The steppe zone is the most important agricultural region of Kazakhstan, making the country one of the biggest wheat producers globally (FAO, 2014), with more than 11 million ha cultivated in 2015 (Results of spring sowing campaign in 2015, 2015).
Kazakhstan today also has one of the world’s largest areas of permanent meadows and pastures (FAO, 2014). Yet, the region has a long land-use history. Historically large charismatic ungulates such as saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) (Singh and Milner-Gulland, 2011), Kulan (Equus hemionus kulan), Przewalski horse (Equus ferus przewalskii) (Bahloul et al., 2001), and Siberian roe deer (Capreolus pygargus) roamed the steppes of Kazakhstan. By the 19th century the numbers of wild ungulates drastically decreased due to hunting (Robinson and Milner-Gulland, 2003). Nomadic peoples inhabited the steppes for millennia, herding their livestock using a transhumance system of summer (“Zhaylau” in Kazakh, or “Letovkas” in Russian) and winter (“Kystau” in Kazakh, or “Zimovkas” in Russian) pastures. They used either northern, or mountain steppes that are rich in biomass, have more water resources and are generally cooler in summer; and deserts and desert
winter. Portable tents (“yurts”) construction allowed for easy migration, and the exact place of camping was frequently defined by the fodder quality and quantity. This system allowed redistributing grazing pressure on steppe, while maximizing fodder availability for livestock (Kerven et al., 2006). Due to a low number of sedentary settlements in the region, crop cultivation was negligible in Kazakhstan before the 19th century when the Russian settlers moved to the northern and eastern regions of Kazakhstan. However, the increase in cultivated area was still low.
The dramatic changes began with the rise of the Soviet Union. First, the collectivization program enforced by the Soviet government in 1929 involved livestock confiscation from nomadic herders and individual farmers in order to establish collective farms. The latter had neither capacity nor feed to maintain large amounts of livestock (Olcott, 1981). In addition, many herders butchered their livestock rather than giving it away. These caused an approximately tenfold decrease in livestock numbers in Kazakhstan and a subsequent famine that took away lives of approximately 1.4 million people, or more than 30 % of the population at that time (Pianciola, 2001). Second, most of the northern part of steppe was allocated for wheat production in 1954 during Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign (McCauley, 1976a). The most fertile Chernozem (black soil) rich areas were ploughed first followed by the less productive Castanozem (chestnut soil) areas. The remaining grasslands were used for intensification of the livestock sector. By that time Soviet agronomists adopted some practices from the local nomads, for example using winter and summer livestock stations to simulate seasonal migration. Nevertheless, the movements were limited by infrastructure and machinery, and the livestock numbers were higher, while the area designated for grazing was smaller than in pre-Soviet times (Kerven et al., 2006). As hunting was controlled by the government, the saiga population also partly recovered. Due to high livestock numbers, grassland degradation possibly took place in parts of the Eurasian steppe (Robinson et al., 2003).
After the breakdown of the Soviet Union in 1990, the area of croplands in the region contracted by approximately 30 %, and the livestock sector collapsed in Kazakhstan with the sheep numbers dropping almost as deep as the level of collectivization time, although without the same catastrophic consequences (Kamp et al., 2011). In spite of the large scale of these changes, information of the exact spatial extent as well as timing of cropland abandonment have been missing so far. Decrease in livestock numbers could result in a drastic decline of a grazing pressure on most of the grasslands. At the same time
machinery and collapsed infrastructure, likely causing overgrazing of these areas (Alimaev et al., 2008). However, neither the spatial patterns nor magnitude of these changes have been mapped. The increase in fuel availability together with decreased control and fire suppression capabilities most probably resulted in the intensification of fire regimes (Brinkert et al., 2016; Dubinin et al., 2011). No study has compared fire regimes in northern Kazakhstan before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, nor have the links between possible intensification of fire regimes and land-use change been studied.
However, the region is frequently marked as a global fire hotspot (Archibald et al., 2013;
Giglio et al., 2013), and traces of fires from this area were found as far as in Alaska (Warneke et al., 2009).
The population of saiga antelopes also decreased dramatically in the 1990s due to the increased poaching as a result of the lack of governmental control (Milner-Gulland et al., 2001) followed by a mass die-off in 2015 (Kock and Robinson, 2019). The government of Kazakhstan has started cropland recultivation and revival of livestock sector as early as the beginning of the 2000s (Meyfroidt et al., 2016; Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2018). Restoring saiga populations as well as reintroducing kulans in the steppe of Kazakhstan are the official goals of the government (Ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Kazakhstan, 2018). Both revival of agricultural sector and conservation programmes require adequate datasets for an effective decision making.