Abstract
This paper presents the trends of landscape change in the marshes on the southern shore of Lake Balaton, a wetland profoundly transformed by human activities. The study does not only deal with alterations in the areal proportions of land use classes but also quantitatively analyses landscape pattern, comparing landscape metrics on different dates. Based on the findings, proposals for rehabilitation are made. Through the restoration of wetland habitats, the provision level of ecosystem services can be raised. Landscape change was investigated from 1783 to 2020. For this purpose, archive maps were digitized, CORINE land cover datasets corrected by Sentinel-2 imagery were employed and from the vector data, the proportions of land use classes were calculated. For landscape pattern perimeter, area, neighbourhood and diversity metrics were used, calculated by ArcGIS vLATE plugin. It was pointed out that in land cover, the share of wetlands considerably declined over the centuries but in recent decades somewhat expanded. In the 20th century, grasslands were the predominant land use class, but with the spread of other categories, land use has become more complex. Landscape metrics show an increased fragmentation of natural habitats, a higher number of patches and edge density, leading to higher landscape diversity. Rehabilitation proposals include the establishment of rainwater retention reservoirs, the conversion of arable land which cannot be cultivated profitably to close-to-natural classes (first of all, grasslands) and the plantation of gallery forests of native tree species along canals. In comparison with other regions, similar temporal trends and spatial distributions are observed. For instance, the internationally well-known transformation of the Doñana wetland started later but was more intensive than in Hungary.
Highlights
Landscape evolution in Hungary took a turn in the second half of the 18th century: as Ottoman Occupation ended, population growth accelerated, and sparsely populated areas were settled again
The areas were selected from the map of the Second Military Survey [12], which still shows them in close-to-natural conditions and the geometrical accuracy allows comparisons with maps from later dates
Arable land only occupied 0.3% of the surface, while grasslands amounted to one-fifth (20.3%) of the area
Summary
Landscape evolution in Hungary took a turn in the second half of the 18th century: as Ottoman Occupation ended, population growth accelerated, and sparsely populated areas were settled again. In the history of land use and pattern changes of the study area, three major periods can be identified: land drainage in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century; the era of socialist planned economy (1950–1989); the period after the regime change of 1990. To use natural resources in a sustainable way and to design strategies to that end, the drivers of landscape-forming processes and the course of landscape evolution have to be studied in detail. Landscape evolution does mean changes in the proportions of land use classes (e.g., Zorrila-Miras et al.) [3] and in landscape pattern presented
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