The spatial pattern of forest cover changes in Lithuania during the second half of the twentieth century

Abstract

The trends of forest cover change in Lithuanian municipalities are introduced in the current paper. Two sources of information on the forest cover in 1950s and today (2013) were used in this study: (i) a geographic forest cover database developed using historical orthophotomaps based on aerial photography, which was carried out in the period just after the World War II, and (ii) the information originating from the State Forest Cadaster and referring to the year 2013. These two layers were compared using GIS overlay techniques. The data was made available for the analyses aggregated up to the municipality level. The Global Moran’s I statistic and Anselin Local Moran’s I were used to identify global and local patterns in the distribution of forest cover characteristics in Lithuanian municipalities, respectively. The main finding of this study was that the proportion of the forest cover in 1950 was 26.5%, i. e. notably differing from the official statistics – 19.7%. The proportion of the forest cover increased in all municipalities during the period 1950–2013. The largest increase in forest cover proportion was in the areas less suitable for agriculture. The relatively largest areas of new forests were identified in the south-eastern part of Lithuania, the deforestation was relatively slowest around less forested municipalities, while the afforestation was relatively slowest around the agricultural Pakruojis municipality. Deforestation was most commonly associated with the forest transformation into agricultural land, less often into scrublands or waters.

Modeling Future Land Use Development: A Lithuanian Case

“…Forest land change trends were most stable not only during the modeled period but also throughout the entire accounting period. Afforestation/deforestation is a relatively slow process in Lithuania [46], strictly regulated from a legal point of view, and therefore potentially the easiest to predict. Similarly, the development of built-up areas has also been steadily increasing since 1970.…”

Development of Land Cover Naturalness in Lithuania on the Edge of the 21st Century: Trends and Driving Factors

“…Usually, long-term trends are involved in converting forest into agricultural land. Thus, the proportion of forest land dropped from ~80% in year 1000 CE [18] to 26% in the 1950s [19]. Climate conditions and productive soils in Lithuania favour the production of crops, resulting in more than 50% of land area being used for agriculture.…”