Wood-pastures in the Czech Republic: change trajectories, proximate causes and underlying driving forces

Anna Pereponova, MSc

Doctoral thesis

Abstract:

This thesis addresses the subject of historic changes in wood-pastures as one of the oldest land use types in Europe. Wood-pastures are landscape segments with trees scattered across an open area, mainly grasslands, which are managed as pastures. Despite their high ecological, cultural, and agricultural importance, these landscapes have recently experienced rapid decline all over Europe due to intensive tree cutting, changes in land use, and lack of regeneration. Although wood-pastures are currently sparse in Czech landscapes, their traces can still be observed. Despite some recent studies, information on their historic change patterns is missing. The main goal of this work is to assess long-term change patterns of wood-pastures in Czechia at the landscape level and to identify the driving factors behind them, which will also increase knowledge about long-term change of land use and land cover in Czechia generally. Identifying and understanding causalities between change patterns and the present state of wood-pastures can serve as a foundation to support sustainable management practices for wood-pastures. The research is executed in three consecutive case studies of sites located in different landscape types throughout Czechia. The first case study is designed to develop and test a suitable methodology for long term spatiotemporal analysis of wood-pastures on the example of lowland areas. The second case study broadens the analysis to cover both lowland and highland areas in two temporal horizons, and also investigates the role of generalised natural characteristics. The last part focuses more closely on the role of various of different natural and human-driven factors and their impact on continuity, occurrence or loss of wood-pastures. Various archival and modern, analogue and digital, sources (e.g. old maps, aerial photographs, etc.) were used. Analytical procedures were performed mainly in GIS (ESRI, 2015) and statistical calculations in R and MS Excel.

Keywords

silvopasture systems, change trajectories, wood-pastures, habitat continuity, GIS analysis

Language used: English

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 8. 10. 2020

Thesis defence

• Supervisor: doc. Ing. Jan Skaloš, Ph.D.

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague

Faculty of Environmental Sciences

Doctoral programme / field:
Environmental Sciences / Applied and Landscape Ecology