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In recent years, Russia has established herself as the leading supplier of grain worldwide and continues to make ambitious plans for raising its grain production in the long-term. Within the context of Russian agricultural history, the recent high growth of grain production is exceptional. This growth however is not fully replicated by the “weather-yield” crop models, which project only moderate yield increase in the 21st century and fail to predict the most recent record growth in grain yields. The difference between the projected climate-dependent yields and observations is especially high in two of the most important agricultural regions, Central Black Earth and Northern Caucasus, while the rest of the agricultural zone is shows good agreement with the regression models. Similar differences were observed in the late 1960s, which we interpret in terms of the fast changes in agricultural technology during the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) agricultural reforms followed by periods of reversal. We also interpret the current period of high differentiation between weather-yield model results and collected yield as evidence of a higher than usual contribution of agricultural reforms in yield improvements, which, however, are primarily benefiting the large-scale producers located in the most productive areas of Russia.

Agricultural landscapes (rural landscapes, agrolandscapes) are territories shaped by agricultural production. They have enabled the development of human civilizations and are a cultural achievement. Peasants, farmers and agricultural enterprises feed society. They have created agricultural landscapes for their business and habitats for their life. To understand transformation processes in agricultural landscapes, we analyse the history of agriculture with a special focus on Europe and Eurasia. Current agricultural landscapes in a crowded, globalized world are multifunctional, highly complex systems. They not only serve to produce food commodities and energy for the increasing and expanding urban population but also provide diverse ecosystem services and need to cater for the demands of the rural population. Current agriculture is highly productive in wealthy countries, but due to high inputs it is also responsible for environmental problems such as water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Industrial-style agriculture in large fields has resulted in increased productivity but simplified the structure of landscapes and eliminated elements of nature and rural culture. Major problems that urgently need to be addressed include trends towards disrupting natural cycles in agricultural production, soil and water degradation, ageing populations in villages and the breakdown of rural infrastructure. Agricultural landscape research provides analyses to understand these processes and helps elaborate sustainable scientific, technical and cultural solutions.

Fil: Mueller, Lothar. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research. Alemania. Fil: Eulenstein, Frank. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research. Alemania. Fil: Mirschel, Wilfried. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research. Alemania. Fil: Schindler, Uwe. Kuban State Agrarian University. Rusia. Fil: Sychev, Viktor G. Pryanishnikov-Institute for Agrochemistry. Rusia. Fil: Rukhovich, Olga V. Pryanishnikov-Institute for Agrochemistry. Rusia. Fil: Sheudzhen, Askhad K. Kuban State Agrarian University. Rusia. Fil: Romanenkov, Vladimir. Moscow Lomonosov State University. Rusia. Fil: Lukin, Sergey M. All Russian Research Institute for Organic Fertiliser and Peat. Rusia. Fil: McKenzie, Blair M. University of Dundee. Escocia. Fil: Jones, Michael. Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Noruega. Fil: Dannowski, Ralf. Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research. Alemania. Fil: Blum, Winfried E. H. University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences. Austria. Fil: Salnjikov, Elmira. Soil Science Institute. Serbia. Fil: Saparov, Abdulla. Kazakh Research Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry. Kazajistán. Fil: Pachikin, Konstantin. Kazakh Research Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry. Kazajistán. Fil: Hennings, Volker. Büro Für Bodenfunktionsbewertung. Alemania. Fil: Scherber, Christoph. Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig. Alemania. Fil: Hoffmann, Jörg. Institute for Strategies and Technology Assessment, Sustainable Agriculture and Biodiversity. Alemania. Fil: Antrop, Marc. Ghent University. Bélgica. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Garibaldi, Lucas A. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Gómez Carella, Dulce S. Universidad Nacional de Río Negro. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Gómez Carella, Dulce S. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Recursos Naturales, Agroecología y Desarrollo Rural. Río Negro, Argentina. Fil: Augstburger, Horacio. University of Bern. Suiza. Fil: Schwilch, Gudrun. University of Bern. Suiza. Fil: Angelstam, Per. Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Suecia. Fil: Manton, Michael. Vytautas Magnus University. Lituania. Fil: Dronin, Nikolai M. Moscow Lomonosov State University. Rusia.

The Food Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation, adopted in 2010, proposed a target of reaching food self-sufficiency by 2022. That concept of food security, unusual among developed countries, is driven by a political vision of the national origin of food and motivated by historical trauma. Our analysis of the climate and geography, historical food crises, and the current agricultural situation shows that the problem of food security in Russia is far more complex than is currently recognized. Even if the goal of self-sufficiency were met, Russia might not find itself food-secure, as it continues to import agricultural equipment and seed stock. And, given a history of regional food separatism, self-sufficiency may prove to be a risky strategy. If Russia’s regions follow suit and aim for local self-sufficiency, they will threaten Russia’s already weakly integrated markets. An alternative goal for Russian food security is the achievement of full integration of the economic space, as that provides price equilibrium over various regions in a year of crop failure. Projected on the regional level, a doctrine of this kind will contribute (as in the late years of Tsarist Russia) to the regions opening up as much as possible, while the influence of non-economic factors (crime, administration, infrastructure deficiency, etc.) drops in the production of and trade with food.

Most vegetated land on earth has been used for agriculture for hundreds of years, shaping the land’s features and functions. Agricultural (rural) landscapes are the basis for feeding the global population and meeting their many other demands. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, agriculture is facing some crucial challenges: feeding more people whilst maintaining natural resources, biodiversity and landscape heritage, and mitigating climate change. This requires new knowledge, innovations and decision tools for taking responsible action. Research on agricultural landscapes provides analyses to help understand landscape processes and elaborates sustainable scientific, technical and cultural solutions. We report on recent progress in some topics of measuring, modelling and monitoring processes, and on organismic diversity in agricultural landscapes, focusing on developments in Western Europe. Information is also given about long-term experimental agricultural research in Russia and neighbouring countries. Results indicate that there has been considerable progress in understanding landscape processes based on experimental and modelling research on different scales. A number of landscape-related research methods and tools have been developed in recent years. These include high-tech measurement systems, models and decision aids, and tools for monitoring and optimising agricultural systems and for agri-environmental monitoring. Many of them also have potential for successfully tackling existing problems with the sustainability of agricultural systems in other landscapes and regions. Transdisciplinary international research projects are required to make innovations operable.

Literature was a significant vehicle for ecological thinking in the post-World War ii Soviet Union. In early 1950 a group of Russian writers known as ‘villagers’ advanced environmental themes, equating preservation of the environment in the face of frenzied industrialization and modernization with the preservation of Russian culture itself. The work of the villagers – so known for their focus on the history and condition of the Russian village – reached its peak in the 1970s when many of them had gained a following among the Soviet intelligentsia as a result of their critical stand on the socialist transformation of rural areas and their advocacy for the protection of land, forests, and rivers. In this period, environmental, social, and moral motifs were artfully presented in village prose. From the mid-1980s a nationalistic element came to dominate their art. In the post-Soviet period this tendency deepened, leading finally to marginalization of village prose.

Modern science is global. This is particularly true of environmental science, which has been guided to a considerable extent by international environmental policy. Accordingly, one might expect the standards of scientific research around the globe to have unified over the last 30 years. Yet environmental scientists from different nations and scientific schools have demonstrably dissimilar views on key environmental issues. This is the conclusion we reached after a series of in-depth interviews with prominent American and Russian environmental scientists. The greatest difference was found in the perception of two global issues—stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change.

We evaluated changes in the deficit of irrigation water in the Fergana Valley of Central Asia under different scenarios of climate change and water management. The Fergana Valley is located within the Syr Darya River basin and is shared by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. We estimated the climate-related changes in irrigational water demand in the Fergana Valley in the 2020s, the 2050s, and 2080s. Considerably higher temperatures and a moderate change in precipitation lead to increasing potential evapotranspiration (PET), which nearly doubles the irrigation water demand by the 2080s. This is driving the request for a scientifically substantiated scheme of irrigation that takes into account the quality of soils and the ground water table, correction of the water consumption norms for different crops, and changes in the crop composition in favor of winter horticulture plantations and cereals.

Our historical review aims to clarify the modern meaning of the term “landscape” in the context of historical evolution of the notion in the twentieth century. A remarkable feature of the history of Russian geography was the coexistence of multiple readings of the term “landscape.” In the 1910s, landscape notion had an important human dimension, whereas Soviet geographers interpreted landscape as a principally natural object. Nor was there ever a monopoly on reading the term “landscape” in the Soviet period. For some Soviet geographers landscapes had definite scale (Solntsev’s landscape) while for many others, the term was applicable for a complex of any scale and rank. For some scientists the terms “landscape” and “geosystem” were synonymous but for others—not. All too often collisions of different interpretations of landscape were a matter of definition. Imperfect argumentation resulted in marginalization of the study of landscape morphology, the most original concept in Soviet geography, and blurring the term. Most modern Russian geographers use the term “landscape” as a synonym of natural complex applicable to units at any spatial scale. The term “geosystem” also is used widely by modern geographers referring in a generalizing and non-selective way to all natural complexes regardless of their spatial scale and rank. For the bulk of modern Russian geographers, the terms “landscape,” “natural complex,” and “geosystem” are loosely interchangeable.

A new geological epoch has begun—the Anthropocene. Huge anthropogenic transformations of terrestrial landscapes over the past five decades have forced its declaration. Exploring of interaction of humans with nature in general, and with landscapes in particular, can be characterised properly by the terms ‘landscape research’ and ‘landscape science’. Landscape science has been a traditional scientific discipline of geography. This is the case in Russia, whilst the terms geo-ecology and landscape ecology have become established in the English-speaking scientific community. As landscapes are multifunctional, highly complex systems, landscape research is a platform for disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. Landscape research in the Anthropocene must aim to combine landscape sustainability with high quality and productivity. This mission is in accord with the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations and the provisions of the Landscape Convention of the European Council. It includes halting landscape degradation, developing cultural landscapes and maintaining semi-natural landscapes. Clean water and air, fertile and healthy soils for food and other ecosystem services and a green and biodiverse environment are attributes of landscapes for the survival and well-being of humans in coexistence with nature. Landscape research must generate knowledge, innovations and responsible decision rules for achieving these aims. Big data gathering and scenario modelling are important for knowledge generation in a globalised world. International long-term experiments, observatories and monitoring systems will deliver data for comprehensive ecosystem models and decision support systems. Technical innovations must be imbedded in cultural solutions for the evolvement of landscapes. Springer International’s new book series ‘Innovations in Landscape Research’ aims to support better understanding, monitoring and managing landscapes. It contains a multitude of approaches and data. Some focus is on technical innovations for agri-environmental monitoring, on land and water management and its implications for landscape sustainability. Authors present novel tools for ecosystem modelling and forecasting of landscape processes, and on creating knowledge, rules and approaches for handling the multifunctionality of landscapes. The coming book series may serve as a knowledge, data and communication basis for informed decisions regarding the development of landscapes. It will enlarge our horizon and field of action by building bridges between scientific communities, scientific disciplines, and researchers and citizens.

Agriculture in Russia has always had to contend with unfavorable climate. At the same time, large-scale socio-economic experiments have also strained the country’s food production potential throughout the 20th century. The relative role of climate and state agricultural policies in affecting production of cereals was studied for the period of 1958–2010. The study used statistical yield modeling to explain the variations in observed yields with slowly changing progress in technology and management and weather variability. The correlation between the actual and weather-explained yields is moderate to high: measured at the level of the entire country, Pearson’s r is 0.74 and Spearman’s rho is 0.68. Further, we suggest that the residual yield variability can be explained partially with the influence of large-scale changes in agricultural policies at the state level. Between these policies, we consider the following key periods in the history of Russian agriculture: “Virgin Lands” campaign (end of 1950s), Kosygin-Liberman initiatives (late 1960s), Brezhnev’s investment programmes in response of stagnation of agriculture (late 1970s – early 1980s), Gorbachev’s “Perestrojka” (1985–1991), and land privatization and price liberalization (1990s).

Farming in higher latitudes is generally believed to benefit from a warmer climate due to extended growing season, reduced risk of frost, availability of more productive cultivars, and an opening potential of farming in northern locations. We analyzed the impact of climate change on production of cereals in Russia and found that this general perception of beneficiary effect of a warmer climate is unlikely to hold, primarily due to increasing risk of droughts in the most important agricultural areas of the country. Past impacts of droughts on food security throughout the twentieth century suggest that a number of adaptation options are available to mitigate the increasing risks of crop failure. We analyze the effectiveness of these measures in connection with a set of climate change projections, under two contrasting scenarios of interregional grain trade: “Fortress Market” and “Open Market.”

While previous studies have focused on impacts of average climate change on Russian agriculture and water resources, this study takes into account the impact of changing frequency and spatial heterogeneity of extreme climate events, and the reliance of most of Russia on a few food producing regions. We analyze impacts of the IPCC A2 and B2 climate scenarios with the use of the Global Assessment of Security (GLASS) model (containing the Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ) crop production model and the Water-Global Assessment and Prognosis (WaterGAP 2) water resources model). As in previous studies we find that decreased crop production in some Russian regions can be compensated by increased production in others resulting in relatively small average changes. However, a different perspective on future risk to agriculture is gained by taking into account a change in frequency of extreme climate events. Under climate normal conditions it is estimated that “food production shortfalls” (a year in which potential production of the most important crops in a region is below 50% of its average climate normal production, taking into account production in food-exporting regions) occur roughly 1–3 years in each decade. This frequency will double in many of the main crop growing areas in the 2020s, and triple in the 2070s. The effects of these shortfalls are likely to propagate throughout Russia because of the higher likelihood of shortfalls occurring in many crop export regions in the same year, and because of the dependence of most Russian regions on food imports from a relatively few main crop growing regions. We estimate that approximately 50 million people currently live in regions that experience one or more shortfalls each decade. This number may grow to 82–139 million in the 2070s. The assessment of climate impacts on water resources indicates an increase in average water availability in Russia, but also a significantly increased frequency of high runoff events in much of central Russia, and more frequent low runoff events in the already dry crop growing regions in the South. These results suggest that the increasing frequency of extreme climate events will pose an increasing threat to the security of Russia's food system and water resources.

While previous studies have focused on impacts of average climate change on food production and water resources, this study takes into account the impact of changing frequency and spatial heterogeneity of extreme climate events, first of all, droughts. We analyze impacts of the IPCC A2 and B2 climate scenarios with the use of the GLASS model (containing the GAEZ crop production model and the WaterGAP water resources model). We evaluate future risk of extreme climatic events for food production and water availability for two important regions of Russia — North Caucasus and Urals. Under climate normal conditions it is estimated that “food production shortfalls” (a year in which potential production of the most important crops in a region is below 50% of its average climate normal production, taking into account production in food exporting regions) occur roughly one to three years in each decade. This frequency will double in the both regions in the 2020s, and triple in the 2070s. The assessment of climate impacts on water resources indicates an increase in average water availability in Russia, but also a significantly increased frequency of high runoff events in much of central Russia, and more frequent low runoff events in the South. Unlike the food production, the situation with water resources looks very different for North Caucasus (Kuban and Don river basins) and Urals (Ural river basin) regions. The results suggest the increasing threat to the water resource of the North Caucasus and more stable water flow in the Urals in the new climate.