How pollution legacies and land use histories shape post-communist forest cover trends in the Western Carpathians

摘要: Abstract Forests that encompass the border triangle of Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia currently suffer from centuries inadequate forest management strategies, including overexploitation during countries’ respective communist regimes high stress levels due to airborne emissions heavy industry. Since fall Iron Curtain, each country has approached monitoring, protection improvement conditions in its own way. Spaceborne remote sensing changes across borders offers great potential for better understanding underlying drivers change developing comparable indicators between countries. For this paper we evaluated how forests changed region 1987 2005 these depended on industrial transformations before after 1989. We used Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier assess cover 2005. Our results showed 8.12% stands our study were degraded either partially or completely time period, percentage equals 14,972 ha area's total cover. At same time, 7.57% (13,951 ha) area reforested regenerated previously damaged stands. Forest similar Slovakia, but differed Poland. Comparing composition, topography, aspect with decline revealed importance pollution legacies times when explaining today's disturbance patterns.