Legacies of 19th century land use shape contemporary forest cover

Abstract Historic land use can exert strong land-use legacies, i.e., long-lasting effects on ecosystems, but the importance of land-use legacies, alongside other factors, for subsequent forest-cover change is unclear. If past land use affects rates of forest disturbance and afforestation then this may constrain land use planning and land management options, and legacies of current land management may constrain future land use. Our goal was to assess if and how much land-use legacies affect contemporary forest disturbance, and the abundance of different forest types in the Carpathian region in Eastern Europe (265,000 km2, encompassing parts of Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Czech Republic). We modeled contemporary forest disturbance (based on satellite image analysis from 1985 to 2010) as a function of historic land use (based on digitized topographic maps from 1860 and 1960). Contemporary forest disturbance was strongly related to historic land use even when controlling for environmental, accessibility and socio-political variation. Across the Carpathian region, the odds of forest disturbance were about 50% higher in areas that were not forested in 1860 (new forests) compared to areas that were forested then (old forests). The forest disturbance in new forests was particularly high in Poland (88% higher odds), Slovakia (69%) and Romania (67%) and persisted across the entire range of environmental, accessibility and socio-political variation. Reasons for the observed legacy effects may include extensive plantations outside forest ranges, predominantly spruce, poplar, and black locust, which are prone to natural disturbances. Furthermore, as plantations reach harvestable age of about 70 years for pulp and 120 year for saw-timber production, these are likely to be clear-cut, producing the observed legacy effects. Across the Carpathians, forest types shifted towards less coniferous cover in 2010 compared to the 1860s and 1960s likely due to extensive historic conifer harvest, and to recent natural disturbance events and clear-cuts of forest plantations. Our results underscore the importance of land-use legacies, and show that past land uses can greatly affect subsequent forest disturbance for centuries. Given rapid land use changes worldwide, it is important to understand how past legacies affect current management and what the impact of current land management decisions may be for future land use.

[1]  F. Swanson,et al.  LANDSCAPE PATTERN RESPONSE TO CHANGES IN PATTERN GENERATION RULES: LAND-USE LEGACIES IN FORESTRY , 1994 .

[2]  T. Plieninger,et al.  Land-use legacies in the forest structure of silvopastoral oak woodlands in the Eastern Mediterranean , 2011 .

[3]  T. Mitchell Aide,et al.  Agriculture expansion and deforestation in seasonally dry forests of north-west Argentina , 2005, Environmental Conservation.

[4]  D. Foster,et al.  Four Centuries of Change in Northeastern United States Forests , 2013, PloS one.

[5]  D. Tilman,et al.  The Importance of Land-Use Legacies to Ecology and Conservation , 2003 .

[6]  Miroslav Svoboda,et al.  Disturbance history of an old-growth sub-alpine Picea abies stand in the Bohemian Forest, Czech Republic , 2012 .

[7]  Peter Fleischer,et al.  A tree‐ring reconstruction of wind disturbances in a forest of the Slovakian Tatra Mountains, Western Carpathians , 2010 .

[8]  J. Tóth.  Magyarország történeti földrajza , 1991 .

[9]  Eric F. Lambin,et al.  Land-use and land-cover change : local processes and global impacts , 2010 .

[10]  D. Griffith.  Spatial Autocorrelation and Spatial Filtering: Gaining Understanding Through Theory and Scientific Visualization , 2010 .

[11]  P. Leitão,et al.  Comparing the determinants of cropland abandonment in Albania and Romania using boosted regression trees , 2013 .

[12]  S. Linden,et al.  Cross-border Comparison of Post-socialist Farmland Abandonment in the Carpathians , 2008, Ecosystems.

[13]  D. Mladenoff,et al.  Why history matters in landscape ecology , 2007, Landscape Ecology.

[14]  I. G. Staritsky,et al.  Deforestation trends in the Atlantic Zone of Costa Rica: A case study , 1992 .

[15]  C. Woodcock,et al.  Post-Soviet farmland abandonment, forest recovery, and carbon sequestration in western Ukraine , 2011 .

[16]  D. Irimie,et al.  Forest property rights in the frame of public policies and societal change , 2009 .

[17]  T. Kuemmerle,et al.  Land use change in Southern Romania after the collapse of socialism , 2009 .

[18]  P. Verburg,et al.  Trajectories of land use change in Europe: a model-based exploration of rural futures , 2010, Landscape Ecology.

[19]  V. Radeloff,et al.  orest and agricultural land change in the Carpathian region — meta-analysis of long-term patterns and drivers of change , 2014 .

[20]  D. Foster,et al.  Legacies of the agricultural past in the forested present: an assessment of historical land‐use effects on rich mesic forests , 2002 .

[21]  R. B. Jackson,et al.  Bias in the attribution of forest carbon sinks , 2013 .

[22]  K. Havstad,et al.  Perspectives on desertification: south-western United States , 1998 .

[23]  Roger L. Sheley,et al.  Land-Use Legacies and Vegetation Recovery 90 Years After Cultivation in Great Basin Sagebrush Ecosystems , 2011 .

[24]  Alexander Strickland Pfaff Talikoff.  What Drives Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon? Evidence from Satellite and Socioeconomic Data , 1996 .

[25]  Subhrendu K. Pattanayak,et al.  Econometric studies of non-industrial private forest management: a review and synthesis , 2005 .

[26]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Agricultural land change in the Carpathian ecoregion after the breakdown of socialism and expansion of the European Union , 2013 .

[27]  Richard J Hobbs,et al.  What's new about old fields? Land abandonment and ecosystem assembly. , 2008, Trends in ecology & evolution.

[28]  Gretchen G. Moisen,et al.  A comparison of the performance of threshold criteria for binary classification in terms of predicted prevalence and Kappa , 2008 .

[29]  P. Curran.  The semivariogram in remote sensing: An introduction , 1988 .

[30]  Katarzyna Ostapowicz,et al.  The Carpathians: Integrating Nature and Society Towards Sustainability , 2013 .

[31]  P. Hostert,et al.  Differences in forest disturbance among land ownership types in Poland during and after socialism , 2009 .

[32]  A. McMichael,et al.  Ecosystems and Human well-being , 2003 .

[33]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Forest restitution and protected area effectiveness in post-socialist Romania , 2012 .

[34]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Using image texture to map farmland field size: a case study in Eastern Europe , 2009 .

[35]  P. Bezák,et al.  Drivers of change in mountain farming in Slovakia: from socialist collectivisation to the Common Agricultural Policy , 2014, Regional Environmental Change.

[36]  M. Clayton,et al.  Legacies of historical land use on regional forest composition and structure in Wisconsin, USA (mid-1800s-1930s-2000s). , 2009, Ecological applications : a publication of the Ecological Society of America.

[37]  S. Cushman,et al.  Rates and patterns of landscape change in the Central Sikhote-alin Mountains, Russian Far East , 2000, Landscape Ecology.

[38]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Patterns and drivers of post-socialist farmland abandonment in Western Ukraine , 2011 .

[39]  Tsehaie Woldai,et al.  Historical land use changes and their impact on sediment fluxes in the Balaton basin (Hungary) , 2005 .

[40]  X. Pons,et al.  Land cover change in Europe between 1950 and 2000 determined employing aerial photography , 2010 .

[41]  D. Hosmer,et al.  Goodness of fit tests for the multiple logistic regression model , 1980 .

[42]  V. Radeloff,et al.  Regional- and district-level drivers of timber harvesting in European Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union , 2011 .

[43]  Eric F. Lambin,et al.  What drives tropical deforestation?: a meta-analysis of proximate and underlying causes of deforestation based on subnational case study evidence , 2001 .

[44]  J. R. Brown,et al.  Woody plant invasion of grasslands: establishment of honey mesquite (Prosopis glandulosa var.glandulosa) on sites differing in herbaceous biomass and grazing history , 1989, Oecologia.

[45]  E. Schulze,et al.  Forest decline and air pollution: a study of spruce (Picea abies) on acid soils. , 1989 .

[46]  E. Dambrine,et al.  Irreversible impact of past land use on forest soils and biodiversity , 2002 .

[47]  D. Foster,et al.  Grasslands, heathlands and shrublands in coastal New England: historical interpretations and approaches to conservation , 2002 .

[48]  Morten B. Hartvigsen,et al.  Land reform and land fragmentation in Central and Eastern Europe , 2014 .

[49]  A. Pfaff.  What drives deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon? Evidence from satellite and socioeconomic data , 1997 .

[50]  J. L. Parra,et al.  Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas , 2005 .

[51]  S. Carpenter,et al.  Global Consequences of Land Use , 2005, Science.

[52]  Gert-Jan Nabuurs,et al.  Natural disturbances in the European forests in the 19th and 20th centuries , 2003 .

[53]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  Using annual time-series of Landsat images to assess the effects of forest restitution in post-socialist Romania , 2012 .

[54]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  How pollution legacies and land use histories shape post-communist forest cover trends in the Western Carpathians , 2009 .

[55]  R. P. Gibbensa,et al.  Vegetation changes in the Jornada Basin from 1858 to 1998 , 2005 .

[56]  P. Leitão,et al.  Drivers of forest harvesting intensity patterns in Europe , 2014 .

[57]  J. Modrzyński.  Defoliation of older Norway spruce (Picea abies /L./ Karst.) stands in the Polish Sudety and Carpathian mountains , 2003 .

[58]  Daniel Müller,et al.  Land use dynamics in the central highlands of Vietnam: a spatial model combining village survey data with satellite imagery interpretation , 2002 .

[59]  T. Kuemmerle,et al.  Lost in transition: determinants of post-socialist cropland abandonment in Romania , 2009 .

[60]  David W. Hosmer,et al.  Applied Logistic Regression , 1991 .

[61]  D. Foster,et al.  CONSERVATION OF CHANGING LANDSCAPES: VEGETATION AND LAND‐USE HISTORY OF CAPE COD NATIONAL SEASHORE , 2003 .

[62]  David A. Seal,et al.  The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission , 2007 .

[63]  V. Radeloff,et al.  Land-use change in the Caucasus during and after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict , 2015, Regional Environmental Change.

[64]  J. Sass,et al.  The Danube River and its Basin Physical Characteristics, Water Regime and Water Balance , 2010 .

[65]  Bodis Katalin,et al.  A pan-European River and Catchment Database , 2007 .

[66]  O. Bouriaud,et al.  Comparative dendroclimatic study of Scots pine, Norway spruce, and silver fir in the Vrancea Range, Eastern Carpathian Mountains , 2009, Trees.

[67]  Julio L. Betancourt,et al.  APPLIED HISTORICAL ECOLOGY: USING THE PAST TO MANAGE FOR THE FUTURE , 1999 .

[68]  T. Heckelei,et al.  Global Environmental Change , 2018, The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

[69]  David Pullar,et al.  Modelling the conversion of Colombian lowland ecosystems since 1940: drivers, patterns and rates. , 2006, Journal of environmental management.

[70]  D. Müller,et al.  Effects of postsocialist reforms on land cover and land use in South-Eastern Albania , 2006 .

[71]  W. Keeton,et al.  Structural characteristics and aboveground biomass of old‐growth spruce–fir stands in the eastern Carpathian mountains, Ukraine , 2010 .

[72]  Patrick Hostert,et al.  A Pixel-Based Landsat Compositing Algorithm for Large Area Land Cover Mapping , 2013, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

[73]  J. Carrier,et al.  Comprehensive Study of European Forests Assesses Damage and Economic Losses from Air Pollution , 1990, Environmental Conservation.

[74]  Ton C M de Nijs,et al.  Determinants of Land-Use Change Patterns in the Netherlands , 2004 .

[75]  C. Justice,et al.  High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st-Century Forest Cover Change , 2013, Science.

[76]  I. Iorgulescu,et al.  Flooding tolerance of Central European tree and shrub species , 2006 .

[77]  F. W. Carter.  Magyarország törteneti földrajzu , 1992 .

[78]  Robert Pazúr,et al.  Spatial determinants of abandonment of large-scale arable lands and managed grasslands in Slovakia during the periods of post-socialist transition and European Union accession , 2014 .

[79]  Javier Gallego,et al.  The European Land Use and Cover Area‐Frame Statistical Survey , 2010 .

[80]  Sharon L. Lohr,et al.  Sampling: Design and Analysis , 1999 .

[81]  J. Swinnen.  The political economy of land reform choices in Central and Eastern Europe , 1999 .

[82]  T. Mitchell Aide,et al.  Balancing food production and nature conservation in the Neotropical dry forests of northern Argentina , 2008 .

[83]  Christine Estreguil,et al.  Forest cover changes in the northern Carpathians in the 20th century: a slow transition , 2007 .

[84]  M. Hermy,et al.  THE IMPORTANCE OF ARTEFACTS OF ANCIENT LAND USE ON PLANT COMMUNITIES IN MEERDAAL FOREST, BELGIUM , 2009 .

[85]  P. Stern,et al.  People and pixels : linking remote sensing and social science , 1999 .

[86]  R. B. Hammer,et al.  Human demographic trends and landscape level forest management in the northwest Wisconsin Pine Barrens , 2001 .

[87]  Anton Van Rompaey,et al.  Impacts of historical land use changes on erosion and agricultural soil properties in the Kali Basin at Lake Balaton, Hungary , 2006 .

[88]  William Rand,et al.  Path dependence and the validation of agent‐based spatial models of land use , 2005, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[89]  Tibor Bellon.  Living Together with Nature. Farming on the River Flats in the Valley of the Tisza , 2004 .

[90]  B. Wyżga,et al.  The Carpathian Mountains: Challenges for the Central and Eastern European Landmark , 2013 .

[91]  S. Gregory,et al.  Econometric analyses of nonindustrial forest landowners: Is there anything left to study? , 2003 .

[92]  Izabela Sitko,et al.  Timberline Changes in Relation to Summer Farming in the Western Chornohora (Ukrainian Carpathians) , 2008 .

[93]  Eric F. Lambin,et al.  Forest transition in Vietnam and displacement of deforestation abroad , 2009, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[94]  Roberto Benedetti,et al.  Agricultural survey methods , 2010 .

[95]  H. Nagendra,et al.  Accessibility as a determinant of landscape transformation in western Honduras: linking pattern and process , 2003, Landscape Ecology.

[96]  W. Keeton,et al.  Forest cover change and illegal logging in the Ukrainian Carpathians in the transition period from 1988 to 2007 , 2009 .

[97]  P. Hostert,et al.  Forest disturbances, forest recovery, and changes in forest types across the Carpathian ecoregion from 1985 to 2010 based on Landsat image composites , 2014 .

[98]  Y. Boucher,et al.  Land use history (1840–2005) and physiography as determinants of southern boreal forests , 2013, Landscape Ecology.

[99]  J. Farley,et al.  Sustainable Forest Management Alternatives for the Carpathian Mountains with a Focus on Ukraine , 2013 .

[100]  W. Keeton,et al.  Continued loss of temperate old-growth forests in the Romanian Carpathians despite an increasing protected area network , 2012, Environmental Conservation.

[101]  A. Bončina,et al.  Factors Related to Natural Disturbances in Mountain Norway Spruce (Picea abies) Forests in the Julian Alps , 2009 .

[102]  Joan Pino,et al.  Spatial Patterns of Land Use Changes Across a Mediterranean Metropolitan Landscape: Implications for Biodiversity Management , 2013, Environmental Management.

[103]  J. W. Bruce,et al.  The causes of land-use and land-cover change: moving beyond the myths , 2001 .

[104]  Jürgen Vogt,et al.  Development of a pan-European River and Catchment Database , 2007 .

[105]  Consideraţii asupra stării pădurilor României - partea I : Declinul suprafeţei pădurilor şi marginalizarea împăduririlor , 2010 .