Abstract

In order to progress previously proposed interoperable for Ukrainian and all-European approaches procedure of anthropization extent analysis for Ukrainian landscapes, new operating scale of anthropization extent for physical-geographic taxons of Ukraine was substantiated and developed. The operating scale of anthropization extent relies, first of all, on created geoinformation basis, which is accessible for area of examination selected for the scale realization. Such area consists of physical-geographic regions and districts as plain landscape aggregations for zones of mixed and broad-leaved forests and forest-steppe. The geoinformation basis was organized by application and appropriate processing of up-to-date open digital spatial data sources. These sources contain, in particular, interactive raster land cover maps of European Space Agency (2015) and National Geomatics Center of China (2011), data of cartographic web-service OpenStreetMap, subject raster electronic maps collected in the National Atlas of Ukraine and other representative sources. There were stated peculiarities of development and implementation for the operating scale of anthropization extent, which embodies 55 operating land use and/or land cover (LULC) systems causing determinate anthropization extent, presented by corresponding to mentioned systems categories and indexes. Initial verifying realization of the anthropization extent operating scale was executed for the examination area, namely for its 25 physical-geographic regions, considering 130 physical-geographic districts, which form these regions. Realization of the scale proved, for the first, overall for examination area unfavorable geoecological situation in land use. Under such situation most of investigated regions and districts are indicated by categories of moderate-great and great anthropization (or β-euhemerobic and α-euhemerobic degree). For the second, there was constructed classed choropleth of anthropization extent categories’ fields, which were simulated for 1 km grid. For the third, there were typified percent distributions by regions for total LULC systems’ areas according to categories of these systems defined by their geoecological favorableness / unfavorableness (or degree of naturalness). Verifying-analogous comparison obtained model anthropization indicators with adequate representative foreign European results (concerning Germany and plain territory of central and west parts of Europe on the whole) proved their coincidence by content. All these jointly verify the objectivity of tools, proposed for model assessment of anthropization extent, and implementation validity of these tools. Prospects for further research were defined, aimed at detailed anthropization extent analysis, first of all by analysis of anthropization extent categories’ fields within physical-geographic districts especially by application of appropriate quasi-spectra and cumulative curves for anthropization indexes and areas.

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