Abstract
Monitoring of land use, land-use changes, and forestry (LULUCF) plays a crucial role in biodiversity and global environmental challenges. In 2015, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) launched the Global Forest Survey (GFS) integrating medium- (MR) and very-high-resolution (VHR) images through the FAO’s Collect Earth platform. More than 11,150 plots were inventoried in the Temperate FAO ecozone in Europe to monitor LULUCF from 2000 to 2015. As a result, 2.19% (VHR) to 2.77% (MR/VHR) of the study area underwent LULUCF, including a 0.37% (VHR) to 0.43% (MR/VHR) net increase in forest lands. Collect Earth and VHR images have also (i) allowed for shaping a preliminary structure of the land-use network, showing that cropland was the land type that changed most and that cropland and grassland were the more frequent land uses that generated new forest land, (ii) shown that, in 2015, mixed and monospecific forests represented 44.3% and 46.5% of the forest land, respectively, unlike other forest sources, and (iii) shown that 14.9% of the area had been affected by disturbances, particularly wood harvesting (67.47% of the disturbed forests). According to other authors, the area showed a strong correlation between canopy mortality and reported wood removals due to the transition from past clear-cut systems to “close-to-nature” silviculture.
Highlights
Monitoring of land use, land-use changes, and forestry (LULUCF), as well as their disturbances, plays a crucial role in the response to global environmental challenges such as climate change (CC) mitigation and diversity conservation
Using only VHR images, it was possible to build a preliminary structure of the LULUCF network, comparing the 2000–2014 and 2015 data, in 62.3% of the study area
The preliminary structure of the LULUCF network showed that cropland was the land-use type that changed most, and both cropland and grassland were mainly transformed into new forest land
Summary
Monitoring of land use, land-use changes, and forestry (LULUCF), as well as their disturbances, plays a crucial role in the response to global environmental challenges such as climate change (CC) mitigation and diversity conservation. LULUCF can disturb the biosphere–atmosphere exchange of carbon, water, and energy fluxes, can modify the ozone concentration [1], or can become a driving force of land and biodiversity degradation [2]. In this regard, land-cover disturbances associated with extreme events and CC, such as wildfires and insect outbreaks, can lead to carbon storage losses in a feedback pattern [3]. National and international carbon reporting systems require terrestrial assessment systems such as forest inventory data combined with carbon estimation methods [6]
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