Abstract
Forests in Europe have been shaped considerably by human activities during most of the Holocene. Changes in forest structure, distribution of tree species and forest biodiversity are partly driven by management history, and many current forest types result from former management. The interdisciplinary project "Long-term woodland dynamics in Central Europe: from estimations to a realistic model" (LONGWOOD) aims to reconstruct long-term dynamics of woodland cover, structure and management in the eastern Czech Republic (Moravia, ca. 27,000 km2), compare the historical and present state of forests, and analyze general patterns of changes and stability of woodlands as well as the role of humans in these processes. In the LONGWOOD project, palaeoecological, archaeological, historical and ecological sources of information on woodland cover, species composition, and human activities (management, settlement density) over the past 7500 years are collected and integrated in the form of a geodatabase. Combining data of different origin, scale, degree of spatial precision and detail into a single geodatabase is a challenging task. The level of detail, information content, and spatio-temporal distribution of data varies between layers as well as individual records according to the nature of the data source and the data itself. The limited and incomplete sources of information until ca. 1100 AD provide a coarser view on forest history while the historical period (especially the past ca. 250 years) is covered by large amounts of precisely located ecological and historical data enabling detailed spatial and temporal analyses. Data on forest structure, history and management will be related to environmental factors (soil type, climate, elevation and other topographic variables derived from DEM) and social historical data (settlement distribution, population density, landuse). A spatio-temporal forest landscape model will be built to assess the forest changes and the main drivers of change.
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