RADFORD – A large-scale land abandonment is taking place in Russia, and Radford University geography professor Grigory Ioffe soon will be conducting field research in his home country to help locate abandoned lands and their potential environmental and social impact.

Ioffe, a Moscow native, recently received a $124,000 national grant award from NASA as part of a larger award for the project, “Land Abandonment in Russia: Understanding Recent Trends and Assessing Future Vulnerability and Adaptation to Changing Climate and Population Dynamics.” Ioffe is collaborating with three other researchers, including Kirsten DeBeurs of Virginia Tech, who is directing the project.

It is estimated that Russia's population will shrink by a staggering 29 percent by 2050. The aim of the “Land Abandonment in Russia” project is to investigate potential sustainable productivity of remaining croplands in Russia under climatic and demographic changes.

“Our modeling approach will predict how possible future climates could influence abandonment patterns in Russia and how adaptive strategies could affect rural re-colonization and re-cultivation patterns,” Ioffe said.

Ioffe’s responsibility will be to locate abandoned lands through fieldwork so that those lands can be easily identified on satellite images. “Satellite imagery reflects natural vegetation and fields of wheat or rye in a different way,” Ioffe said. “But there’s one more category, which is kind of mixed: abandoned fields subject to spontaneous, wild reforestation.”

The RU professor’s work on the project will begin in August and last three years. The research grant is Ioffe’s sixth national research award since 1995. Last May, Ioffe received a $50,000 grant from the National Council of Eurasian and East European Research for the project “The Poorly Illuminated Periphery of Europe: The Geography of Russia's Shrinking Population." The project began in October and is scheduled to be finished in 2010.

Currently, Ioffe is writing a textbook, Global Studies: Russia and the Eurasian Republics. The book will be his 10th, six of which have been published in the United States. Ioffe’s last book, Understanding Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark, was published by the Rowman and Littlefield Publishers in 2008.