Evaluating the effects of institutional change on regional hydrometeorology: Assessing the vulnerability of the Eurasian semi-arid grain belt

The 20th century witnessed some of the most extensive and abrupt LCLUC events in human history. In the mid-1950s, Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands Program rapidly expanded the intensive cultivation of grains across the Eurasian steppes. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s is now recognized as another widespread LCLUC event. The principal mechanism of LCLUC across this region was the disintegration of the institutions of centralized control over the agricultural sector. Without these controls and subsidies the agricultural sector contracted sharply during the 1990s throughout the Former Soviet Union and its client states. There were significant consequent changes in biogeophysical processes, including the onset and timing of land surface phenology (LSP) that links the ecological dynamics of the vegetated surface with the atmospheric dynamics of the boundary layer. Using the NASA MODIS products to detect trends in LSP from 2000 to 2007, we find a large expanse of highly significant negative trends located along the southern tier of the study area (Figure 1) with isolated patches of highly significant positive trends in the arid lands of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.