Natural reforestation is changing spatial patterns of rural mountain and hill landscapes: A global overview

Quantifying Landscape-Scale Patterns of Temperate Forests over Time by Means of Neutral Simulation Models

“…The phenomenon we observed could be considered as reforestation (sensu Sitzia et al [69]), that is, the natural reestablishment of a forested landscape on disused agricultural lands following farm abandonment [70] in regions where the potential natural vegetation (sensu Zerbe [92]) is a forest. The presence of many (NP) irregular patches (AWMSI), with increasing values of connectivity (COHESION) and patch dimension (LFP), underlines a transitional stage of forest re-growth.…”

“…After recording the total number of patches of forest (NP), we focused on the other three class landscape metrics, which had been previously reported as ecologically meaningful [22,63] and have been proven to be useful in describing patch spatial structure in a forested landscape context [64][65][66][67][68][69]: largest forest patch index (LFP), area weighted mean shape index (AWMSI) and patch cohesion index (COHESION). NP and LFP were selected, because they are related to forest fragmentation [33,66,67,70], defined as the breaking up of one large forest area into many smaller patches [71].…”

“…COHESION measures the physical connectedness of forests and is commonly used for describing habitat connectivity [75,76]. In conditions of natural forest re-growth, an increment in time of landscape cohesion and connectivity could be expected [69]. COHESION, which ranges between 0 and 100, is minimal when the proportion of the forested landscape decreases and becomes increasingly subdivided and less physically connected.…”

Length of stay in urban areas of circular migrants from the mountainous areas in China

“…In existing studies, the effects and consequences of out-migration have been issues of increasing concern in mountainous areas (Gellrich and Zimmermann 2007). For instance, as a result of rural-urban migration, mountain regions are experiencing events characterized by agricultural land abandonment and natural forest recovery (Gellrich and Zimmermann 2007;Gray 2009;Izquierdo and Grau 2009;Sitzia et al 2010). However, in these areas, rural-urban migration itself has been given little attention.…”

“…Because of the large population and long history of agricultural development, the pressure of population on agriculture is very high in many mountain areas, which has proved to be one of the important ecological and social problems in this country (Sitzia et al 2010;Wang et al 2012). In recent years, many rural workers in mountain areas have migrated to urban areas (Ding et al 2005;Yu et al 2013).…”