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Changes in cropland have been the dominating land use changes in Central and Eastern Europe, with cropland abandonment frequently exceeding cropland expansion. However, surprisingly little is known about the rates, spatial patterns, and determinants of cropland change in Eastern Europe. We study cropland changes between 1995 and 2005 in Argeş County in Southern Romania with two distinct modeling techniques. We apply and compare spatially explicit logistic regressions with artificial neural networks (ANN) using an integrated socioeconomic and environmental dataset. The logistic regressions allow identifying the determinants of cropland changes, but cannot deal with non-linear and complex functional relationships nor with collinearity between variables. ANNs relax some of these rigorous assumptions inherent in conventional statistical modeling, but likewise have drawbacks such as the …