Abstract

Post-WWII displacements in the Polish Carpathians resulted in widespread land abandonment. Most of the pre-war agricultural areas are now covered with secondary forests, which will soon reach the felling age. Mapping their exact cover is crucial to investigate succession–regeneration processes and to determine their role in the landscape, before making management decisions. Our goal was to map post-agricultural forests in the Polish Eastern Carpathians using archival remote sensing data, and to assess their connectivity with pre-displacement forests. We used German Flown Aerial Photography from 1944 to map agricultural lands and forests from before displacements, and Corona satellite images to map agricultural lands which converted into the forest as a result of this event. We classified archival images using Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) and compared the output with the current forest cover derived from Sentinel-2. Our results showed that mature (60–70 years old) post-agricultural forests comprise 27.6% of the total forest area, while younger post-agricultural forests comprise 9%. We also demonstrated that the secondary forests fill forest gaps more often than form isolated patches: 77.5% of patches are connected with the old-woods (forests that most likely have never been cleared for agriculture). Orthorectification and OBIA classification of German Flown Aerial Photographs and Corona satellite images made it possible to accurately determine the spatial extent of post-agricultural forest. This, in turn, paves the way for the implementation of site-specific forest management practices to support the regeneration of secondary forests and their biodiversity.

Highlights

  • Post-agricultural forests develop on former farmlands and differ in species composition from those with no record of agricultural use [1,2,3]

  • Post-agricultural forests develop in a different way than ancient forests and even several decades after agricultural land abandonment, they are still recovering [1,10,11]

  • Mature post-agricultural forests constitute a substantial part of Carpathian forests

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Summary

Introduction

Post-agricultural forests develop on former farmlands and differ in species composition from those with no record of agricultural use [1,2,3]. There are many examples of mapping abandoned farmland [6,7] and forest cover changes [8,9], but limited research has focused on mapping post-agricultural forest in late succession stages. Post-agricultural forests develop in a different way than ancient forests and even several decades after agricultural land abandonment, they are still recovering [1,10,11]. Documenting their accurate extent is crucial to investigate succession–. Forests with long continuous history are characterized by a higher biodiversity and occurrence of ancient forest species [2,13]

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