Open Habitats under Threat in Mountainous, Mediterranean Landscapes: Land Abandonment Consequences in the Vegetation Cover of the Thessalian Part of Mt Agrafa (Central Greece)

Konstantinos Chontos and Ioannis Tsiripidis ()
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Konstantinos Chontos: Department of Botany, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece
Ioannis Tsiripidis: Department of Botany, School of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece

Land, 2023, vol. 12, issue 4, 1-22

Abstract: Land abandonment is one of the main drivers of land use/land cover (LULC) change across Europe, which has already led to a significant loss of open habitats, threatening species hosted in them. We investigated LULC changes for a period of 70 years in a mountainous area of central Greece (Mt Agrafa) by mapping its land cover for the years 1945, 1996 and 2015, calculating transition matrices of land cover classes and performing intensity analysis at different levels. Subareas of the study area, with different population trends, were compared in regard to their LULC change trends. Possible drivers of LULC changes were explored by means of Random Forest modeling, and landscape metrics were calculated to assess their trends. Our results showed great changes in LULC class cover, significant shrinkage of open habitats, accelerated rates of change in the recent period and no differences in LULC change patterns in relation to different population trends. Variables expressing favorability of ecological conditions for forest establishment or probability of farmland abandonment were found as more important drivers of the spatiotemporal distribution of LULC classes, while landscape metrics revealed certain trends. Our main conclusion is that land abandonment and the subsequent vegetation succession are going through a semifinal stage, before their completeness and the almost absolute dominance of the forest, and repopulation of the countryside cannot unconditionally ensure any halting effect on the land abandonment process.

Keywords: biodiversity threat; countryside repopulation; farmland abandonment; forest vegetation; landscape metrics; Mediterranean landscapes; partial dependence plots; vegetation succession; woodland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:12:y:2023:i:4:p:846-:d:1118263

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