Mountain Arable Land Abandonment (1968–2018) in the Romanian Carpathians: Environmental Conflicts and Sustainability Issues

Abstract

The agricultural mountain landscape in the Romanian Carpathians follows the same change trend in other European mountains, from variety and individuality to simplification and uniformization. Our paper proposes two complementary case studies from the Southern Carpathians—Poiana Mărului and Fundata, representative areas for the entire Carpathian ecoregion. The research focuses on a remote sensing approach with Corona KH-4B (1968) and Planet Scope (2018) images at 2.0–3.0 m resolution used for mapping arable plots pattern and size change. Landscape transformation modelling is focused on four-hectare sampled grid for both case study areas, followed by a landscape metric analysis. Fundata area is the most transformed, where arable plots disappeared under the service-based economy pressure. Poiana Mărului shows an earlier stage of landscape transformation, where the arable land abandonment process is incipient. The spatial and statistical analysis and field survey confirmed that tourism changed the traditional agricultural landscape, generating potential environmental conflicts and indicating the sustainability degree.

Assessment of Changes in a Viewshed in the Western Carpathians Landscape as a Result of Reforestation

“…However, in the Carpathians considered as the entire region, forest cover decrease stopped between WW I and WW II. It indicates that the Carpathians experienced a forest transition during the Interwar period, despite regional differences [29,62]. The beginning of the decline in viewshed in the study area at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be associated with the development of forest management carried out by the then owners of forests in the Beskids-The House of Habsburg-who introduced restrictions on the use of forests by the local population, and reforested the previously purchased glades [63].…”

Demographic Resilience in the Rural Area of Romania. A Statistical-Territorial Approach of the Last Hundred Years

“…In Romania, the information on this phenomenon is incomplete and its extent can be detected rather indirectly by following the evolution of cultivated areas, without knowing if the decline observed in recent decades is due to land abandonment or change of use. The development of tourism, where possible, is sometimes a sustainable alternative, stimulating the preservation of a certain part of the population, especially in mountainous areas [40]. However, the cases in which the rural population has stabilized due to tourism development are rather isolated, at least until now.…”

An Algorithm for Delimiting Rural Areas According to Soil Classes

“…Central and Eastern Europe is a region Land 2022, 11, 158 2 of 17 in which agricultural land is intensively abandoned. This fact is associated with attempts at aligning agriculture with changes after the collapse of socialism in the 1990s [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Decreased production in rural areas leads to an intensive increase in forest cover due to natural forest succession.…”