Long‐term changes in Italian mountain forests detected by resurvey of historical vegetation data

Abstract

Aim: In the last decades most European mountain forests have been abandoned after centuries of human management, paving the way for a landscape planning oriented to the conservation and rewilding of forest ecosystems. By resurveying historical vegetation plots in a mountain area of the Italian Apennines (southern Europe), we focused on yet overlooked processes in this area, to allow for a more comprehensive picture of the ongoing dynamics at a broad forest landscape scale. Location: Mountain forests in the northern Apennines, Italy. Methods: We resampled 22 historical forest vegetation plots recorded between 1934 and 1961. In each original quasi-permanent plot, three plots were sampled to improve the reliability of the comparison. We analyzed changes in forest cover, structure, alpha, beta, and gamma diversity, and ecological groups focusing on the understorey species community. Results: Forests are getting poorer in species in the understorey, with a higher tree layer and denser canopy cover. Alpha and gamma diversity significantly decreased from the original to the resurveyed plots. Several species of open habitats were associated with the original plots, while in the resurveyed plots several shade-adapted species were detected. Forest cover in the surroundings of the sites remained stable for the higher sites along the Apennines mountain ridge, while major changes in the surroundings and in species composition were detected for the plots located at lower elevations and marginal sites. Conclusions: Our main findings are in line with the majority of resurvey studies performed in European forests, with a general mesification of local communities after management cessation. Despite the limited number of available historical plots, their location along a wide gradient of elevation and naturalness allowed considering also the importance of site location, forest continuity and marginality as drivers of changes that need to be taken into account when planning conservation actions for restoration of mature forests.

Historical GIS as a Tool for Monitoring, Preserving and Planning Forest Landscape: A Case Study in a Mediterranean Region

“…In fact, only 33% of the forest areas cleared before 1950 has returned to forest (Figure 13). In addition to the statistical data, the historical GIS allows for spatialization of these data in a way that can be used by forest ecologists to evaluate the characteristics of these new forests [64]. Therefore, the position of the forests is partly different from that of 1860.…”

The importance of history for understanding contemporary ecosystems: Insights from vegetation science

“…In terms of data sources and methodological approaches, three papers are based on resurveys of historical vegetation plots (Kapfer & Popova, 2021; Lelli et al, 2021; Máliš et al, 2021). The ecological data were used as information about past vegetation composition and diversity, i.e.…”

“…The first and simplest is location, which shows that four studies are from France (Abadie et al, 2021; Jamoneau et al, 2021; Lenoir et al, 2021), including the single review in this special issue (Bergès & Dupouey, 2021). The remaining studies are from Russia (Kapfer & Popova, 2021), Italy (Lelli et al, 2021), the Czech Republic (Szabó et al, 2021) and Slovakia (Máliš et al, 2021). Two of the eight papers are from the Mediterranean region, one from the Arctic.…”

“…Long‐term trends are clearly a common platform for different approaches of vegetation ecology. In terms of anthropogenic impacts on ecosystems, most attention has been focused on management and biodiversity (Abadie et al, 2021; Jamoneau et al, 2021; Lelli et al, 2021; Máliš et al, 2021). Apart from biodiversity, climate change is the most topical issue in conservation ecology research today (Anderson et al, 2021) – yet climate change served as the interpretation framework for only one of the presented studies and even there not exclusively (Kapfer & Popova, 2021).…”

“…Recent vegetation data are predominant, with a total of six papers. Most of them also use archival data, including maps and aerial photographs, to reconstruct the long‐term development of the study ecosystems (Abadie et al, 2021; Jamoneau et al, 2021; Lelli et al, 2021; Lenoir et al, 2021). One article also uses palaeoecological (specifically anthracological) data (Máliš et al, 2021).…”