Identification of extent, topographic characteristics and land abandonment process of vineyard terraces in the Tokaj-Hegyalja wine region between 1784 and 2010

Abstract

The terracing of vineyards has been a centuries-old traditional land use type in the Tokaj-Hegyalja region (887 km 2 ). However, most of them have since been abandoned and are occupied by dense vegetation. In this study, we mapped the spatial extent of vineyard terraces, based on aerial photos. We classified the terraced fields, considering their topographic characteristics as assessed by topographic factors (slope, exposure and elevation) and the process of abandonment between 1784 and 2010 using historical and contemporary land use maps. Based on the overall map of vineyard abandonment (scale: 1:120,000), the process of the abandonment of terraces can be divided into six consecutive time intervals (). Vineyard terraces were found on 590 ha, which were concentrated on hillsides steeper than 17%, on southwestern, southern and southeastern exposures, and lying between 150 and 500 m a.s.l. In the period between 1884 and 1989, 77.8% of the terraces were abandoned, with a particularly intense period of abandonment between 1940 and 1969, which saw a 31.1% decrease in the extent of cultivated terraces. ARTICLE HISTORY

Mapping Cropland Abandonment in Mountainous Areas Using an Annual Land-Use Trajectory Approach

“…In general, aerial photographs have higher spatial resolutions than those of satellite images. When identifying the abandoned cropland in topographically variable areas, such as gullies [32] and terraces [33,34], aerial photographs have been adopted. For ultra-high resolution tasks, aerial photographs are very useful for identifying detailed information regarding abandoned cropland, such as the height of succession vegetation after land abandonment [35] and the forest transition from deforestation to afforestation [36].…”

“…Although some research has been conducted in identifying abandoned cropland using remote sensing technology, huge challenges remain, e.g., differentiating abandoned cropland from fallowed cropland and recultivated abandoned cropland [2,8,24,26,34,[37][38][39][40]. In prior work, abandoned cropland was usually identified by dividing the changes in vegetation or land use conversions using snapshots of land use data at the start and end years of a given research period.…”

Viticultural landscapes: Localised transformations over the past 150 years through an analysis of three case studies in Slovakia

“…Extensification and the abandonment of traditional vineyards in our study areas occurred simultaneously with the modernised vineyard intensification and subsequent abandonment in the second half of the 20 th and beginning of the 21 st centuries. This abandonment of traditional vinegrowing areas in the second half of the 20 th century was also common in other Slovak and European wine regions (Agnoletti, 2015;Incze and Novák, 2016;Lieskovský et al, 2015;Petanidou et al, 2008). The driving factors here were agricultural industrialisation, labour loss to cities and extensive urban development (Olarieta et al, 2008;Tarrolli et al, 2014).…”

Failure and Collapse of Ancient Agricultural Stone Terraces: On-Site Effects on Soil and Vegetation

“…Indeed, the abandonment of stone-terraced agricultural lands might have a detrimental impact on the on-site conservation of water and soil. This is because maintenance and repairing of terraces has ceased [14][15][16]. Such adverse impacts were reported for abandoned terraced fields in the Peruvian Andes [17], Northern and Southeast Spain [5,18], Northwest Crete [19], Northern, Central, and Southern Italy [20,21], and Southern Israel [22].…”