Period Of Land Use Research Articles

Factors determining vegetation recovery after abandonment of coal-mining villages

There have been many earlier studies of the biodiversity and ecosystem services of abandoned farmlands, but studies of abandoned villages are limited, particularly in Asian countries. The drastic aging and depopulation of Japanese society will likely lead to increased village abandonment in the future. To properly manage abandoned villages and build a comprehensive land-use plan, we need to know how natural succession will proceed after the abandonment of local towns and villages. We investigated forest structures and compositions at the sites of abandoned mining villages and compared them with ambient undisturbed natural forests. The environmental factors that determine plant succession are the distance from ambient forests, land-use period, and years since abandonment. The results showed that the sizes of tall trees and species diversity of understory vegetation recovered to the level of the control sites approximately 50–60 years after village abandonment. However, the species compositions of tall trees and understory vegetation were fairly different from those of the control sites. The distance from ambient natural forest, which regulates the seed supply for abandoned sites; land-use periods, which are surrogates for the durations of anthropogenic disturbance; and times since abandonment are strong drivers of the recovery of forest species compositions.

Modern fire regime resembles historical fire regime in a ponderosa pine forest on Native American lands

Forests on tribal lands in the western United States have seen the return of low-intensity surface fires for several decades longer than forests on non-tribal lands. We examined the surface fire regime in a ponderosa pine-dominated (Pinus ponderosa) forest on the Hualapai tribal lands in the south-western United States. Using fire-scarred trees, we inferred temporal (frequency and seasonality) and spatial (synchrony) attributes and regulators of the fire regime over three land-use periods (historical, suppression, modern) between 1702 and 2007. Patterns of fire frequency and synchrony were similar, but fire seasonality was dissimilar, between the historical and modern periods. Logistic regression and generalised linear mixed models identified a suite of variables representing fuels, climate and human land uses that were associated with the probability of a site burning. Combined, these results allow for valuable insights regarding past fire spread and variability in fire frequency throughout our study area. In some respects, the current distinct fire regime in our study area, which predominately consists of prescribed fires implemented since the 1960s, resembles the past frequent surface fire regime that occurred here and in similar forest types on non-tribal lands in the south-western United States. Our results will be useful for informing adaptive management throughout the region as climate warms.