Long-term Changes in Dwarf Pine (Pinus mugo) Cover in the High Tatra Mountains, Slovakia

Abstract

The present article focuses on the distribution of Pinus mugo under conditions in the central Tatra Mountains, the main mountain range of the Western Carpathians. We analyze the response of P. mugo distribution to selected abiotic habitat conditions in the eastern Tatra Mountains. The study also compares data on the distribution of P. mugo in the higher central Tatras and in the hills of the western Tatras published in previous studies. The source data for this study were aerial photographs from 3 periods (1955, 1986, and 2002). Mountain areas covered by mountain pine were identified and analyzed by ArcGIS 10, and pine fields were classified with the help of the gray scale mode. A strip of mountain pine above the upper limit of the forest represents an easily identifiable boundary on the aerial photographs: 25 wellrecognized localities were selected to examine the changes in the tree line in the eastern Tatras. The distribution of mountain pine increased in the central granite and eastern limestone Tatra Mountains from 1955 to 2002 at all monitored sites. The percentage of total surface area covered in P. mugo increased from 28.11% in 1955 to 34.74% in 1986 and to 39.01% in 2002. The study also analyzes the dispersal of mountain pine over 40 years in relation to elevation, slope, radiation aspect, flow accumulation, and vertical and horizontal curvature. The results of this study explain ongoing vegetation changes and are of importance as a contribution to monitoring of climate change in the mid-European mountain areas.

Holocene fire-regime changes near the treeline in the Retezat Mts. (Southern Carpathians, Romania)

“…Human activities (pastoralism, clearance, burning) may have prevented the timberline from rising naturally in the warmer conditions. The rapid increase of anthropogenic-pollen indicators together with decreasing pollen abundances of P. mugo and P. cembra around 700 cal yr BP at Lake Lia suggests that the local tree and shrub cover was opened by more intensive pastoral activity during the Middle Ages, when anthropogenic land-cover change involved greater clearance of the mountain-pine thickets to obtain new pastures (Solár and Janiga, 2013). The absence of detected fire-episodes from 700 cal yr BP onwards at Lake Lia may thus be the result of reduced fuels due to livestock grazing that effectively suppressed fire occurrence (Bowman et al, 2011) by thinning the P. mugo shrublands for grassland.…”

Demography linked to climate change projections in an ecoregional case study: integrating forecasts and field data

“…Seedling migration upslope in response to climate change appears to be shifting treelines upward worldwide (Lloyd and Fastie 2003, Lenoir et al 2009, Solár and Janiga 2013. While northward shifts in latitude are occurring in some species (Woodall et al 2009) a contractive rather than expansive distributional pattern dominates in other studies (Zhu et al 2012, Bell et al 2013) indicating a failure of seedlings to migrate northward.…”

Water Surface Overgrowing of the Tatra’s Lakes

“…Changes occurred only at the point of evident changes in their overlap with the historical orthophoto map. This method is useful particularly for identification of changes in landscape cover and structure (Boltižiar, 2007;Falťan, Bánovský, 2008;Solár, 2013;Solár, Janiga, 2013;Haladová, Petrovič, 2015;Kaczka et al, 2015;Kubinský et al, 2015), but it seems to be applicable for the assessment of geomorphological processes (Kapusta et al, 2010;Hreško et al, 2012;Długosz, Kapusta, 2015) and dynamics of lake shorelines (Kapusta, 2016). When digitizing the data in GIS (shorelines in this case), only a copy of the original layer, not the completely new layer is created.…”