RS is organized into 62 municipalities and comprise 2,745 settlements.
The average population density is 47 people per km2(Census, 2017). The entire territory is part of three morphologic
clusters: Pannonian region, mountain-valley region and Adriatic region
(Figure 1A). These regions contain diverse climatic regimes which are
characterized by a Mediterranean climate in the southwest,
continental-mountain in the central and north region, and moderate
continental climate in the remaining area (Trbić et al., 2017).
According to the World Reference Base classification (WRB, 2014), the
most widespread soils in RS are Mollic Leptosol, Haplic Cambisol and
Leptic Cambisol. RS is a predominantly mountainous region, mainly
covered by forest (52%) and agricultural (40%) land, with some urban
areas (8%) and few water bodies (Corine LC, 2018). Large proportion of
forest land are degraded from deforestation on steeper hillsides
(Kapović et al., 2013), resulting in soil erosion and consequent land
degradation (Kostadinov et al., 2019). Most of the arable land in RS is
not used (45.5%) (Statistical journal, 2017), and has been abandoned
since the late 1990s (Tošić et al., 2019). Large areas of abandoned land
are now overgrown with vegetation (UNEP, 2017) and have practically lost
the status of agricultural land. This was linked with population
decrease in RS, from 190.804 people in 1985 to 53.781 households in 2012
(Agency, 2017). This is due to migration of people from these lands,
which resulted in significant declines in agricultural production and a
7% increase of abandoned land since 1985. In the northern region of RS,
agricultural production decreased due to migration during both the
conflict and post conflict period, but is still dominant land use.
Agriculture areas managed under intensive agricultural practicies (i.e.
cropland cultivation, monoculture of main crops) are impacted by
erosional processes and are the most serious land degradation driver
mention on literature (Tošić et al., 2011; Tošić et al., 2013).
Data on soil erosion intensity and trends are given by the reconstructed
Soil Erosion Map of the RS, developed during the period from 1979–1985
(Lazarević, 1986) and then compared with the soil erosion map developed
only for the RS territory after the war (Tošić et al., 2012).
RESULTS