Spatial determinants of abandonment of large-scale arable lands and managed grasslands in Slovakia during the periods of post-socialist transition and European Union accession

• We analysed determinants of the abandonment of arable lands and grasslands in Slovakia.
• We analysed post-socialist (1990–2000) and the EU accession period (2000–2006).
• Abandonment occurs on less fertile soils and inaccessible areas, close to non-farmed land.
• Most of the abandoned areas were observed in mountainous regions.

Agricultural land abandonment represents one of the most significant processes affecting today's European landscapes. This process occurs more intensively in the post-socialist Central and Eastern European countries, where the adoption of a market-oriented economy after the era of socialism and the implementation of EU policies were the greatest challenges of recent decades. In this article, we analyse the spatial determinants of abandonment of large-scale arable lands and grasslands in two time periods: the transition period (1990–2000) and the EU accession period (2000–2006). The analyses were performed on a country-wide and region-specific scale. The abandoned fields were identified based on CORINE land cover change analyses, then the role of morphometric, biophysical, distance and demographic variables was analysed with the use of logistic regression estimations and AUC (Area Under Curve) statistics. Similar to other studies from post-socialist countries we observed much higher rates of abandonment during the transition period. The abandonment was more likely to occur on fields with lower soil quality located on less accessible areas close to non-farmed land. Particularly in the transition period we found that the abandonment was largely influenced by the migration and changes of population structure in rural areas. Fewer determinants played a role during the EU accession period compared to the transition period. The dominance of abandonment in the mountainous region and changes in the determinants underline the importance of topographic disaggregation in the region-based modelling of agricultural land-use change.