Landscape and positional substantiation of the withdrawal of fallow lands from agricultural use in Nonchernozem zone by the example of Kalininsky municipal district of Tver region

Agriculture in the Tver Region, and the Kalininsky Municipal District, in particular, have suffered greatly from the withdrawal of lands from agriculture use and depopulation. The sown area has decreased by 8 times from the late 1960s to 2023. In this regard, the Government of the Russian Federation adopted the “State Program for the Effective Involvement of Agricultural Lands in Circulation...”, within the framework of which it is necessary to assess the area and quality of fallow lands. This paper assesses the quality of agricultural land in the Kalinin District based on both large-scale land management materials from the Soviet period and using digital soil mapping methods. The compiled map of agroecological land groups made it possible to assess the quality of the municipal district lands and determine the feasibility of crop growing on them. It was determined that the weakly semihydromorphic-lithogenic, lithogenic land and upland groups have the highest agroecological value. The total area of deposits within these groups is 33.5 thousand ha or slightly more than 15% of the total area of agricultural land in the Kalininsky District. Putting hydromorphic lands into agricultural use in the Region is not advisable. To assess the role of landscape and positional factors in land abandonment, an inventory of the areas and condition of agricultural lands was conducted, and the distances from important infrastructure and natural objects were calculated. It was found that the greatest impact on the withdrawal of follow lands from agriculture use was the distance from hard-surface roads, and the landscape factor took the second place, and it is almost 3 times less significant according to the F-criterion of discriminant model. The remaining positional factors (distances from wetlands and watercourses) turned out to be secondary.