Socio-economic And Land-use Changes In The
Pedja River Catchment Area, Estonia
Author(s)
K. Meier, V. Kuusemets & Ü. Mander
Abstract
During the last 15 years, large-scale socio-economical changes have occurred in
Estonia. This has been influencing agricultural activities and has resulted in land-use
changes with ecological consequences. The relative share of agriculture in
GDP has dropped from 19% to 3.1 during the last 20 years, the number of people
employed in agriculture has decreased from 136 800 to 31 500 during the last
15 years. This has caused a loss of jobs and the abandonment of agricultural
land. The biggest change in land use has been the overgrowing of ecologically
valuable wooded meadows, floodplains, alvars, and natural grasslands. The area
of wooded meadows has decreased from 850 000 ha in the 1940s to 800 ha at
present. Also, in the community of Puurmani, the human population has dropped
11% during the last 3 years. Agricultural activities have declined significantly;
the number of pigs has decreased 24 times and the number of cattle, 1.6 times
during last 15 years. 514 ha of former flooded meadows and wooded meadows
of River Pedja have reverted to forest and 33 ha to dense bush at present.
Keywords: biodiversity, flooded meadows, land-use changes, socio-economic
changes, wooded meadows.
1 Introduction
During the last years, considerable socio-economic changes have occurred in the
whole of Europe. For Eastern European countries these changes have been
remarkable during the last 15 years as a result of political changes. At the
beginning of the 90s a rapid change in the political system, from Soviet Socialist
Republic to the independent state of Estonia, took place, which gave new
opportunities for the development of the country. This included ownership
changes, which in rural areas meant the liquidation of the old system of
Keywords
biodiversity, flooded meadows, land-use changes, socio-economicchanges, wooded meadows.
Related Book
Other papers in this volume
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