Trends in the National and Regional Transitional Dynamics of Land Cover and Use Changes in Romania

Abstract

The crucial importance of land cover and use changes, components of the ‘global changes’, for the worldwide sustainable and resilient development results from their negative influence on ecosystem services, biodiversity, and human welfare. Ongoing debates concerning whether the global drivers are more important than the local ones or which are the most prominent driving forces and effects are still ongoing at the global level. In Europe, the patterns of land cover and use changes differ between the west and the east. Property restitution was an important driver of change in Eastern Europe and especially in Romania. This study aimed to look at the land cover and use changes in Romania by their transitional dynamic using Coordination of Information on the Environment (CORINE) data in an attempt to identify long-term spatially and temporally consistent trends. Although generally inconsistent, the results indicate that deforestation and urbanization tend to prevail over other changes, and the development of agriculture slows its pace. Such findings are consequences of unplanned development associated with little environmental awareness. The presence of hotspots where land cover and use changes seem to be clustered can be seen as a feature of ex-socialist countries undergoing economic transition.

Degradation of Coastlines under the Pressure of Urbanization and Tourism: Evidence on the Change of Land Systems from Europe, Asia and Africa

“…The results are presented in Figure 6, which includes in addition information on the population and density of the administrative units, in order to help visualizing the relationship. Although deforestation is an important transitional dynamic for Romania [90,[114][115][116][117], the results indicate that within the CA it does not follow a consistent pattern with population or its density, which explains why their correlation was not statistically significant; this may happen because deforestation occurs on small isolated parcels [90,[114][115][116][117], but also because of the fact that forests are scarce and unevenly distributed in the coastal area. Urbanization seems to occur most in the seaside resorts and less in the Danube Delta.…”

“…Data were processed by identifying the transitional dynamics [90] characteristic to Romania associated with: (1) urbanization, defined as transformations within the cities indicating the urban growth (such as: "construction sites" to "urban fabric"), and transformation of agricultural, natural, wetland or water surfaces into artificial surfaces, (2) deforestation, consisting of the transformation of forests into other land cover classes, (3) reforestation, representing the opposite process of (2), (4) abandonment of agriculture, constituting the transformation of agricultural land into urban or natural land and inner transformations of the agricultural land classes indicating the abandonment (e.g., colonization by natural vegetation, loss of irrigations), and (5) development of agriculture, which is the opposite process of (4) [90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102].…”

“…As part of the European Union, Romania benefits upon the CLC data, a large data set covering LCLU and their changes starting 1990. There are potential problems associated with CLC data, applicable to this study, due to the misclassification and differences in the classification schemes and resolutions from one period to another [90,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][156][157][158], but also due to the different resolutions (e.g., the CLC dataset has a minimum mapping unit for status layers of 25 hectares, while, minimum the mapping unit for CLC is 5 hectares). Nevertheless, CLC data have proved their usefulness in analyzing urban sprawl [159] and other LCLU changes in Europe [160,161] and even outside the European Union [162], and even in fostering local development [163].…”

Recent land cover and use in Romania: A conservation perspective

“…LCUCs are also associated with the 'transitional dynamics' (Lambin and Meyfroidt, 2010), which are in fact their socio-economic drivers. The transitional dynamics represent the conversion of a given land cover/use (or their sets) into another land cover/use (Petrişor et al, 2014(Petrişor et al, , 2020; some of them are ascertained based on the initial use (e.g., deforestation), others by the final one (e.g., urbanization). Comparative studies carried out across Europe have pinpointed differences between the West and the East (Kupková et al, 2013).…”

Elaziğ İli̇’nde Arazi̇ Kullanimi Deği̇şi̇mi̇ (2006-2018) Ve Si̇mülasyonu (2030)

“…CORINE data is used extensively in the international literature today in land use change and simulation studies (Kucsicsa et al, 2019;Ustaoğlu and Aydınoğlu, 2019;Petrişor et al, 2020;Cieślak et al, 2020). This study focuses on land use change and land use projection based on the CORINE project data in Elazığ province.…”