2022 Volume 32 Issue S Pages 53-60
Located in Central Asia, Kazakhstan is characterized as a semi-arid region which includes dry steppe land in the south. Agriculture carried out in this area is typically oasis farmland with water taken from local rivers used for irrigation. During the former Soviet Union, irrigation projects were widely carried out to expand agricultural land, and large-scale irrigation projects were created in several areas. However, many of these areas were abandoned since the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. In recent years, agricultural reforms have been carried out in Kazakhstan, and the privatization and fragmentation of agricultural land has progressed due to the free trade of agricultural land use rights. The study area of the Zharkent (Panfilov) Region is located on the border between Kazakhstan and China, is a semi-arid area and has been cultivating corn by irrigation from the Ili River and the Usek River for many years. Therefore, there are many abandoned agricultural lands because of salinization. However, this area is the start point of the railway and highway of China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR or Belt and Road Initiative, BRI) project to Europe, and corn production and exports are expected to flourish. In this study, we focus on the vulnerability of oasis agriculture and extract changes in agricultural land for about 30 years from 1989 to the present using Landsat series and Sentinel series and visualized them using RGB col-or combined techniques. The results show that agricultural land is disappeared or desertified at the Ili river basin and at the foot of the Zhongar-Alatau Mountains and that there are several years of fallow even in areas where agriculture is active. Using the Zharkent region in the irrigated alluvial fan of zhongar-Alatau Mountains of eastern Kazakhstan as an example, we classify the farm field changing using Landsat TM and Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and identify of vulnerability to the disappearance of oases farmland.
