Abstract
Secondary forest succession on abandoned agricultural land has played a significant role in land cover changes in Europe over the past several decades. However, it is difficult to quantify over large areas. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for mapping forest succession patterns using vegetation structure information derived from LiDAR data supported by national topographic vector data. This work was performed in the Szczawnica commune in the Polish Carpathians. Using object-based image analysis segments of no vegetation, and sparse/dense low/medium/high vegetation were distinguished and subsequently compared to the national topographic dataset to delineate agricultural land that is covered by vegetation, which indicates secondary succession on abandoned fields. The results showed that 18.7% of the arable land and 40.4% of grasslands, that is 31.0% of the agricultural land in the Szczawnica commune, may currently be experiencing secondary forest succession. The overall accuracy of the approach was assessed using georeferenced terrestrial photographs and was found to be 95.0%. The results of this study indicate that the proposed methodology can potentially be applied in large-scale mapping of secondary forest succession patterns on abandoned land in mountain areas.
Highlights
Quantification of secondary forest succession is critical for the sustainable management of forestry and agricultural resources, biodiversity monitoring and climate change modeling [1]
The aim of our study was (1) to develop a robust methodology to map secondary forest succession patterns on abandoned lands in the Polish Carpathians based primarily on LiDAR data that are acquired through airborne laser scanning (ALS) and (2) to test the ALS classification results with georeferenced terrestrial photographs
The general approach consisted of the following steps: (1) Derivation of gridded vegetation indices based on LiDAR point clouds; (2) Segmentation of the raster data; (3) Classification of image segments based on vegetation indices; (4) Analysis of vegetation patterns for the selected land use classes that were extracted from the national topographic dataset and delineation of secondary forest succession areas; (5) Verification of the mapped secondary forest succession using georeferenced terrestrial photographs
Summary
Quantification of secondary forest succession is critical for the sustainable management of forestry and agricultural resources, biodiversity monitoring and climate change modeling [1]. 100 years, Europe has experienced an increase in forest cover [2,3,4] due to afforestation and forest expansion on abandoned agricultural land. The latter has played a significant role in land cover changes in Europe over the past several decades [5,6,7,8], in marginal mountain areas [9,10,11,12,13,14]. As well as a significant increase in fallow or abandoned agricultural land with visible signs of forest succession. Ostafin [21] showed that between 14.9% and 46.6%
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