Abstract:This study uses fractal analysis to quantify the spatial changes of forest resources caused by an increase of deforested areas. The method introduced contributes to the evaluation of forest resources being under significant pressure from anthropogenic activities. The pressure on the forest resources has been analyzed for Maramures , County, one of the most deforested counties in Romania. In order to evaluate this, the deforested areas were calculated for the period of 2001-2014, by using the Global Forest Change 2000-2014 database. The Fractal Fragmentation Index (FFI) and Fixed Grid 2D Lacunarity (FG2DL) were used to quantify the degree of fragmentation and dispersion of the forested areas, and thereby the extent to which a forest area is affected by deforestation. The process of quantifying the pressure on forested areas included the creation of a database for the period of 2000-2014 containing economic activities (turnover) related to woody recourses, important indicators of forest exploitation. Taken together, the results obtained indicate a dramatic increase in deforested areas (over 19,122 ha in total for the period of analysis), in Maramures , County.
Nowadays, Southwestern Romania faces a large-scale aridization of the climate, revealed by the rise of temperatures and the decline of the amount of precipitations, with negative effects visible, among others, in the desiccation of forest vegetation. The present study means to identify the changes that occurred, quality-wise, in the past two decades (1990-2011) in forest vegetation in Southwestern Romania, and to establish the link between those changes and extant thermal stress in the region, whose particular features are high average annual and seasonal temperatures. In order to capture the evolution in time of climate aridization, a first step consisted in using climate data, the temperature and precipitation parameters from three weather stations; these parameters were analyzed both individually and as aridity indexes (De Martonne and UNEP). In order to quantify the changes in forest vegetation, NDVI indexes were used and analyzed, starting off from Landsat satellite images, acquired at three distinct moments in time, 1990, 2000 and 2011. In order to identify the link between the changes of NDVI index values and regional thermal stress, a yardstick of climate changes, statistical correlations were established between the peak values of average annual temperatures, represented in space, and negative changes in the NDVI index, as revealed by the change-detection analysis. The results obtained indicated there is an obvious (statistically significant) connection between thermal stress and the desiccation (degradation) of forest species in the analyzed area, with false acacia (Robinia Pseudoacacia) the main species to be impacted.
Deforestation and forest degradation have several negative effects on the environment including a loss of species habitats, disturbance of the water cycle and reduced ability to retain CO 2 , with consequences for global warming. We investigated the evolution of forest resources from development regions in Romania affected by both deforestation and reforestation using a non-Euclidean method based on fractal analysis. We calculated four fractal dimensions of forest areas: the fractal box-counting dimension of the forest areas, the fractal box-counting dimension of the dilated forest areas, the fractal dilation dimension and the box-counting dimension of the border of the dilated forest areas. Fractal analysis revealed morpho-structural and textural differentiations of forested, deforested and reforested areas in development regions with dominant mountain relief and high hills (more forested and compact organization) in comparison to the development regions dominated by plains or low hills (less forested, more fragmented with small and isolated clusters). Our analysis used the fractal analysis that has the advantage of analyzing the entire image, rather than studying local information, thereby enabling quantification of the uniformity, fragmentation, heterogeneity and homogeneity of forests.
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