THE STUDY OF LAND COVER CHANGES IN BLACK TISZA RIVER BASIN AND ITS FACTORS BASED ON THE ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL IMAGERY
Journal Title: Вісник Одеського національного університету. Географічні та геологічні науки - Year 2015, Vol 20, Issue 4
Abstract
The purpose. of the study was to reveal the principal land cover changes in the study area in Ukrainian Carpathians during last several decades, to analyse their spatial pattern and to reveal their main factors. Data & Methods. The Black Tisza river basin (total area 567.72 km2) was chosen as a study area. The data used in the study included processed Landsat 5 TM imagery for 1989, 1998 and 2009, SRTM DEM, and OpenStreetMap vector data. Semi-Automatic Classification Plugin for QGIS has been used to single out land cover classes, while R glm( ) function and hierarchical partitioning package have been applied for analysing relationships between land cover transitions and its supposed factors. Results. The study revealed that the total forested area has decreased substantially in 1989–1998 period and has stabilized thereafter. The main factors influencing the forests disappearance have differed substantially between two periods: before 1998 this happened mainly on steep slopes of lower locations, while after 1998 the proximity to existing settlements has become the most significant predictive spatial variable of forest disappearance. The main variable spatially connected to the restoration of forests for both periods has been the proximity to existing forest patches, while for the second period there have also been signs of the afforestation on steep slopes. The widespread disappearance of alpine and subalpine vegetation communities, which in this area are located near the low limit of their habitat, have been observed after 1998. Another disturbing observation is the continued loss of core forest habitats and the increase in fragmentation of forest patches, as was revealed by analysing the changes in a set of landscape indices.
Authors and Affiliations
A. Mkrtchian, D. Svidzinska
Keywords
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