Abstract
Reconstruction of historical deforestation helps to understand the dynamics of forest cover change and provides a basis for the further study of human-nature interactions over the long term. Significant agriculture-driven deforestation occurred in the 18th century in China due to its socio-cultural transformation. To understand this deforestation during the 18th century, we took typical counties in western Hunan as a case study area and reconstructed the settlements’ expansion and densification as indicators of socio-cultural factors. We then reconstructed the agricultural land expansion and agriculture-driven deforestation based on these settlements. The results showed that the agricultural land area increased by 40.4% from the early to the late 18th century, while the proportion of forest area covering the region decreased from 78.0% to 69.1%. Meanwhile, agriculture-driven deforestation mainly unfolded in the eastern and western parts of the region at relatively low elevation in the early 18th century, and this mainly happened in the middle of the region lying at relatively high elevation in the late 18th century. This study’s results provide an improved spatial resolution for the reconstruction of historical land use/cover change, thus enabling insights to be gained from a more detailed spatiotemporal pattern of historical deforestation trends. This study helps to understand the anthropogenic land cover change on a larger spatiotemporal scale through a regional case study.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralThirty-one percent of the global land area is covered by forest, including tropical, subtropical, temperate, and boreal forest ecosystems [1]
Since the deforestation in this study was reconstructed on agricultural land expansion, an assessment of the agricultural land area can alsobased demonstrate the reliability expansion, an assessment of the agricultural land area demonstrate the reliability of the reconstruction of deforestation
A significant agriculture-driven deforestation occurred in the 18th century in China due to its the socio-cultural transformation
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralThirty-one percent of the global land area is covered by forest, including tropical, subtropical, temperate, and boreal forest ecosystems [1]. Given that forest is so important, anthropogenic forest clearing has a noticeable impact on environmental change [2,4,5]. As a type of land use/cover change (LUCC or LULC), deforestation is a major source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and is recognized as a major driver of biodiversity loss [2,4,5]. Forest cover loss is driven by multiple factors, and the paramount cause is the agricultural activity (e.g., land reclamation) in the mid and low latitude areas [6,7]. Studying agriculture-driven deforestation dynamics can help one better understand the environmental changes caused by humans [4,6]
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