Changes and continuity of wood-pastures in the lowland landscape in Czechia

Abstract

The term wood-pastures is usually applied to areas with trees or other woody vegetation, scattered through a mainly grazed grassland area, and reflects one of the oldest land use types in Europe, which plays important ecological, agricultural and socio-cultural roles. However, a rapid decline in their area due to changes in land use and a lack of tree regeneration has recently been observed all over Europe, which has led to the necessity of a deeper understanding of their behaviour in relation to different factors via a detailed analysis of the history of the changes in their distribution over space and time. Despite the recent increase in the number of related studies, information on historic patterns of wood-pastures in many European locations, such as Czechia, remains incomplete. The goal of this study is to assess the habitat continuity of current wood-pastures and to analyse the land-use/land-cover changes of historical and current wood-pastures in lowlands and warm landscapes of hills and basins of Czechia. To achieve this, nine sites covering a total area of 98.6 km² were studied in Czechia. The situation on three time horizons (1820–1840s, the early 1950s and today) was analysed. The results have shown that almost all wood-pastures from the 1st half of the 19th century have now been lost and most of the currently existing ones were formed from the 1950s till today. Most wood-pastures, which were lost by the 1950s, were turned into open habitats, such as arable lands, and the ones lost from 1950 were turned into forest. New wood-pastures are mostly formed from open habitats, often in former military areas.

Introduction

Wood-pastures, grazed grasslands with scattered trees or shrubs, are threatened landscape features all over Europe. This is perceived as a negative tendency because wood-pastures are increasingly being recognized for their great ecological, cultural and agricultural importance (Hartel & Plieninger, 2014). The ecological value expressed is given by great structural diversity (Garbarino and Bergmeier, 2014, Jakobsson and Lindborg, 2015), extensive but multiple land use (Opperman, 2014), and the presence of trees serving as keystone structures (Manning, Fischer, & Lindenmayer, 2006). Specifically, old trees are typical for wood-pastures in Britain (Butler, 2014, Read, 2000) and in Romania (Hartel et al., 2013, Moga et al., 2016). Economic use of wood-pastures can be varied. In Europe, trees and grassland in wood-pastures have traditionally served as a source of fodder for grazing animals, the trees also for timber or fuelwood and their crop for pannage (Szabó and Hédl, 2013, Szabó, 2013). Traditional management methods include hay making, berry and fruit picking, which is typical for Germany (Bergmeier et al., 2010, Hartel et al., 2015). Nowadays, the aim is to build new links between wood-pastures and people (Hartel & Plieninger, 2014). Cultural value is explained mainly as the tradition that wood-pastures represent, which is perceived by farmers in Estonia (Roellig et al., 2015) and in Romania (Sutcliffe, Öllerer, & Roellig, 2014). The potential of wood-pasture landscapes for regional development was understood in whole communities in the Black Forest in Germany (Bieling & Konold, 2014). As an example of the value of wood-pastures from the point of view of aesthetical perception, farmers and common inhabitants in the Alentejo region in Portugal appreciate complex landscapes, such as the Portuguese type of wood-pasture, montado, for their visual qualiies. (Surová, Pinto-Correia, & Marušák, 2014).

We can state that people start to be somewhat aware of the importance of landscapes as soon as they start to be threatened (Antrop, 2005). Bergmeier and Roellig (2014) name as some of the most important threats to wood-pastures the decline of old trees, lack of trees regeneration (Kirby, 2015), overgrowing by woody vegetation, and land-use intensification by transforming a wood-pasture into either a pasture without trees or into different land use. Conversely, Roellig et al. (2015) refer to wood-pastures restoration in Estonia. Van Uytvanck, Maes, Vandenhaute, and Hoffmann (2008) talk about wood-pastures formation on former arable land and grassland in Belgium. Our study deals with land-use and land-cover change (LUCC), describing the processes of persistence, extensification and intensification in the case of past wood-pastures on the one hand, and the formation of new ones on the other.

In recent decades, the number of studies monitoring changes in the landscape have increased, especially accelerated by the emergence of geographic information system (GIS) (Cousins, 2001, Echeverría et al., 2012, Ihse, 1995, Pino et al., 2010, Kienast, 1993, Munteanu et al., 2014, Plieninger, 2012). The ability to more easily monitor the land use/cover changes (further referred to as LULC) has played a key role (Turner, Lambin, & Reenberg, 2007). There are also many relevant studies focusing on the analysis of spatial changes in the landscape (Khromykh and Khromykh, 2014, Boltižiar, 2001, Hreško and Boltižiar, 2001, Hreško, and Bugár, 2003, Olah et al., 2006, Seabrook et al., 2007, Spanò and Pellegrino, 2013). It is especially important is to study landscape persistence (Bürgi, Hersperger, & Schneeberger, 2004).

In relation to pastures, Pǎtru-Stupariu, Tudor, Stupariu, Buttler, and Peringer (2016) used old maps to study the persistence of pastures, forests and built-up areas in Romania's Carpathians in the periods between 1912, 1980 and 2009. From the studied temporal horizons, the highest proportion of pastures existed in 1980. Pastures showed higher persistence than forests and built-up areas. In reflect of the situation in Czechia, Bičík, Jeleček, and Štěpánek (2001) analysed cadastral evidence from 1845 to 2000. Of all the analysed classes of land use, the sharpest decline between 1845 and 1948 was seen in grasslands. On the other hand, an increase in the share of the same class between 1990 and 1999 was again sharpest in grasslands in comparison to other categories.

Change trajectories of non-forest woody vegetation, which is another topic closely linked to wood-pastures, was analysed by Plieninger, Schleyer, Mantel, and Hostert (2012), who described the spatial-temporal dynamics of trees outside forest in Eastern Germany in the period 1964–2008, which showed a positive net change during the socialist and post-socialist period. Scattered fruit trees were the only declining type of non-forest woody vegetation. Demková and Lipský (2015) described a decline in non-forest woody vegetation in Eastern Czechia during the socialist period and its expansion during the post-socialist period.

It is important to study LUCC and the persistency of wood-pastures to learn about the threats influencing wood-pastures and the drivers underlying the ancient ones. So far, LUCC in silvopastoral landscapes has been studied intensively, especially in Iberian Peninsula. The results showed a decline in montado and dehesa area in the 2nd half of the 20th century (reviewed by Costa, Madeira, Santos, & Plieninger, 2014). If we take into consideration land persistence, in a case study of two areas in south-western Spain, 78% and 89% of the initial wood-pasture area remained persistent between 1956 and 1998. Here, shrub encroachment was the most common cause of losses. The gains occurred in most cases on former grasslands and shrublands (Plieninger, 2006). In southern Portugal, 41%, 42% and 81% of the wood-pasture area respectively in three different areas proved to be persistent between 1958 and 2007 (Costa, Madeira, Lima Santos, & Oliveira, 2011). In Northern Lesvos in Greece, 90% and 55% of wood-pastures in two areas respectively were persistent between 1960 and 2010 (Schaich, Kizos, Schneider, & Plieninger, 2015). In southern Germany, 78% of orchard meadows (regardless of whether grazed or not) between 1968 and 2009 were persistent (Plieninger et al., 2015b). A totally different situation was observed in the case of the Italian Alps, where between 1961 and 2003 there was only 16% and 5% persistence in wood-pasture area in two study areas, respectively, which were defined here by 10–30% tree canopy cover. The wood-pastures were typically transformed into forests (Garbarino, Lingua, Subirà, & Motta, 2011). Varga, Ódor, Molnár, and Bölöni (2015) give evidence about wood-pasture formation in the 19th century in Hungary and their extinction in the post-socialist era. This is the only study focusing explicitly on wood-pasture landscape dynamics in East-Central and Eastern Europe which we found.

As for Czechia, we know that wood-pastures covered about 1.6% of the whole area of the country in the 1st half of the 19th century (Krčmářová & Jeleček, 2016) when the general trend of separation of forest and agricultural use on one piece of land was occurring (Jørgensen & Quelch, 2014). According to the point database LUCAS, 1.1% of Czechia in 2012 was covered by wood-pastures (Plieninger et al., 2015a), although it was believed that silvopastoral systems virtually did not exist there (Hartel et al., 2015). Little is known about the history of these habitats or whether there are some potentially ancient wood-pastures. In the current study, which is focused on wood-pastures in lower parts of Czechia, we try to answer the following questions:

1.

How long is the continuity of wood-pastures?

2.

What are the sinks of wood-pastures from the past?

3.

What are the sources of current wood-pastures?

We will answer the questions by analysing change trajectories in GIS using land use maps from the 1st half of the 19th century, orthophotos from the 1950s and 2013/4 complemented by field mapping.