Assessing Land Cover Change Trajectories in Olomouc, Czech Republic

Olomouc is a unique and complex landmark with widespread forestation and land use. This research work was conducted to assess important and complex land use change trajectories in Olomouc region. Multi-temporal satellite data from 1991, 2001 and 2013 were used to extract land use/cover types by object oriented classification method. To achieve the objectives, three different aspects were used: (1) Calculate the quantity of each transition; (2) Allocate location based landscape pattern (3) Compare land use/cover evaluation procedure. Land cover change trajectories shows that 16.69% agriculture, 54.33% forest and 21.98% other areas (settlement, pasture and water-body) were stable in all three decade. Approximately 30% of the study area maintained as a same land cove type from 1991 to 2013. Here broad scale of political and socio-economic factors was also affect the rate and direction of landscape changes. Distance from the settlements was the most important predictor of land cover change trajectories. This showed that most of landscape trajectories were caused by socio-economic activities and mainly led to virtuous change on the ecological environment

Assessing Land Cover Change Trajectories in Olomouc, Czech Republic

Olomouc is a unique and complex landmark with widespread forestation and land use. This research work was conducted to assess important and complex land use change trajectories in Olomouc region. Multi-temporal satellite data from 1991, 2001 and 2013 were used to extract land use/cover types by object oriented classification method. To achieve the objectives, three different aspects were used: (1) Calculate the quantity of each transition; (2) Allocate location based landscape pattern (3) Compare land use/cover evaluation procedure. Land cover change trajectories shows that 16.69% agriculture, 54.33% forest and 21.98% other areas (settlement, pasture and water-body) were stable in all three decade. Approximately 30% of the study area maintained as a same land cove type from 1991 to 2013. Here broad scale of political and socio-economic factors was also affect the rate and direction of landscape changes. Distance from the settlements was the most important predictor of land cover change trajectories. This showed that most of landscape trajectories were caused by socio-economic activities and mainly led to virtuous change on the ecological environment

Changes in spatial discontinuity in settlement patterns in the Czech-Polish border area : a case study of Těšín Silesia

The paper presents a discontinuity-based analysis of the settlement pattern changes in the Czechia–Poland cross-border historical region of Těšín Silesia. An approach based on a well-known and popular method (regression discontinuity design) was applied to measure spatial discontinuity. To describe the spatiotemporal changes, a combination of spatial, statistical and cartographic methods was used. The observed differences have been developing for more than 150 years; at the start, this area belonged to the territory of one state, and later it was divided by a national border. The division of the region resulted in areas following different development trajectories

Long-term carbon sink in Borneo's forests halted by drought and vulnerable to edge effects

Less than half of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions remain in the atmosphere. While carbon balance models imply large carbon uptake in tropical forests, direct on-the-ground observations are still lacking in Southeast Asia. Here, using long-term plot monitoring records of up to half a century, we find that intact forests in Borneo gained 0.43 Mg C ha‾¹ per year (95% CI 0.14—0.72, mean period 1988-2010) above-ground live biomass. These results closely match those from African and Amazonian plot networks, suggesting that the world's remaining intact tropical forests are now en masse out-of-equilibrium. Although both pan-tropical and long-term, the sink in remaining intact forests appears vulnerable to climate and land use changes. Across Borneo the 1997-1998 El Niño drought temporarily halted the carbon sink by increasing tree mortality, while fragmentation persistently offset the sink and turned many edge-affected forests into a carbon source to the atmosphere

Analyzing post-socialist grassland conversion in a traditional agricultural landscape – Case study Croatia

Shrub encroachment and agricultural intensification have been a widespread occurrence in the former communist and socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Such changes have strongly affected grassland areas which are seen as hotspots of biodiversity in Europe. In this study we have investigated the changes in grassland cover as well as the causal mechanism of those changes in a selected region in Northern Croatia during the post-socialist transition. By using the mixed methods approach we combined remote sensing, statistical modelling and a household-based questionnaire (n = 285) to map the changes in the grassland cover and to assess the socio-economic and bio-physical contributing factors of the documented changes. The results demonstrate that areas seeing general depopulation trends and population ageing, along with increases in the amount of educated people are characterized by shrub encroachment and farmland abandonment, while flatlands and lowland areas are seeing higher rates of grassland to farmland conversion. The results also show that the partial de-agrarization characteristic for the socialist period has become a full de-agrarization in the post-socialist period, with the main impetus being education, rather than employment, as was the case during socialism

Spationomy

This open access book is based on "Spationomy – Spatial Exploration of Economic Data", an interdisciplinary and international project in the frame of ERASMUS+ funded by the European Union. The project aims to exchange interdisciplinary knowledge in the fields of economics and geomatics. For the newly introduced courses, interdisciplinary learning materials have been developed by a team of lecturers from four different universities in three countries. In a first study block, students were taught methods from the two main research fields. Afterwards, the knowledge gained had to be applied in a project. For this international project, teams were formed, consisting of one student from each university participating in the project. The achieved results were presented in a summer school a few months later. At this event, more methodological knowledge was imparted to prepare students for a final simulation game about spatial and economic decision making. In a broader sense, the chapters will present the methodological background of the project, give case studies and show how visualisation and the simulation game works

From a conceptual restructuring of the understanding of environmental ethics – to philosophical representations and actions

The article presents a new view on minimizing and overcoming the consequences of the violation of coevolutionary "equilibrium" in the system "nature-society". The analysis shows that there are no differences in the system of eco-values, neither in the European integration nor in a certain state context. The modern movement of environmental consciousness reveals certain contradictions between the perception of environmental ethics and real actions and environmental practices. It is proved that the time factor (delayed awareness of threats and intensification of actions) requires a rapid response of mankind to the environmental situation and the involvement in the action of all worldview systems of values, especially philosophical. Based on theoretical reconstruction and the method of generalization of ideas, philosophical representations of the greening of ethics and greening of ecology are explained. Public "translation" of philosophical reflection from academic language to a wide range of fundamental values of ecosophy a) will help assess the threatening context of world development as one that requires not so much scientific and technological advances as the education of a person where the development of ecosystems occurs in various unstable trajectories; b) argues the inability to overcome environmental problems by the efforts of one country; c) prove the need for the transition of man from the level of everyday consciousness, where values cover the immediate range of needs and do not contain a "cultural code" to prevent the spontaneous development of the system "nature-society"; d) expand the experience of ecophilic traditions, including mythology, religion, art, everyday worldview, etc. The most important meaning of representations is the provision that humanity must find combining meanings and values, not for perception and reasoning, but to reconcile private interests with universal and to accept them as imperatives and motives for urgent joint action. Keywords: ecoethics, ecophilic tradition, representation, synergy, time factor, philosophical reflectio

Humans as biodiversity engineers: trait-based approaches to understand human impact on temporal changes in plant communities

Although the current human impact on ecosystems is unprecedented, human activities have been altering ecosystems for millennia. The temporal domain in ecology is understudied but increasingly recognised for its relevance to comprehending natural dynamics and contextualising recent biodiversity change. Understanding how human activities shape plant communities, spatially and temporally, is crucial to anticipate possible undesirable consequences. Because plants are central to maintaining ecosystem functioning, changes in species composition might alter ecosystem functioning and affect human well-being. However, the links between human impact, species composition and ecosystem functioning are challenging to grasp when solely studying species composition. Trait-based approaches in ecology allow for a greater understanding of relationships between human impact, species composition and ecosystem functioning. In this thesis, trait-based approaches are applied in novel ways to understand how humans shape plant composition over long time scales. Pollen records are the main source of information on past plant composition. Using the trait-based approach to reconstruct plant functional composition from pollen records, might allow for the extension of the time scales of functional ecology. In Paper 1 I tested the reliability of using pollen records for reconstructing past plant trait composition. I compared plant trait composition reconstructions based on modern pollen samples with the trait composition of the surrounding vegetation. I found there was high uncertainty in the relationship between vegetation trait composition and pollen-based trait reconstructions. Because of the low sample size in this study, a possible positive relationship between pollen-based reconstructions and vegetation trait composition is not ruled out. However, these results advocate for carefully trait variation within pollen taxa and encourage further testing of the trait-based approach in palaeoecology. In Paper 2 I examined how the start of agriculture changed plant functional composition in Europe. To reconstruct plant functional composition from 78 pollen records, I used a novel Bayesian approach to include trait variation within pollen taxa. I demonstrated a four-fold decrease in whole plant size since the beginning of agriculture. Especially in the last 2000 years, a trend towards the acquisitive end of the leaf economic spectrum was shown. Both agriculture and climate may have played a role in this trend. These results indicate that by modifying plant functional composition, early agriculture might have significantly impacted biogeochemical cycles. In Paper 3 I tested if life-history traits can explain relatively recent population-level and community-level changes using the global biodiversity database BioTIME. I did not demonstrate a relationship between life-history, human impact and population change. To test how life-history influences community-level changes, I calculated species’ contribution to turnover. Life-history traits are important predictors of contribution to turnover, but these effects are conditional on the degree of human use and climate change intensity. Knowing the traits and population changes of species that are strong contributors to turnover, could lead to a better understanding of the processes that drive biodiversity change. Together, this thesis demonstrates novel ways to use traits for understanding human impacts on plant communities in the temporal domain. It shows that there are challenges in applying traits to understand temporal changes in plant communities, but also that there are new insights to be gained from it