Recent land cover change with regard to heterogenic abiotic conditions in watershed of a high mountain stream in the Western Carpathians, Slovakia
Abstract
In today's rapidly changing world, a focus on nature conservation is still not prevalent enough in research providing us with existential values. In this study, we evaluated the recent change in landscape cover over a selected part of the Javorinka mountain catchment. Using editing of aerial orthophotos from between 2010 and 2019, we developed a detailed landscape cover layer, evaluated by ArcMap software. Within this relatively brief period of nine years, we observed a subtle shift of vegetation zones to higher elevations as well as a significant loss of healthy forest to wind disturbance and bark beetles. Based on our results, the natural regeneration capacity of the forest is evident, where we observe a significant increase in the area of young forest over the area of previously damaged forest and dry or dead forest. At the same time, we observed almost no significant changes in artificial surfaces, indicating a general trend of urbanization and depopulation of rural areas. The contribution of this work lies in the attempt to explain and understand short-term landscape cover changes in a small but heterogeneous mountainous environment, and the resulting effort to better adjust conservation management.
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