environmental-science-2018-posters-abstracts

Environmental Science & Technology 2018

Journal of Environmental Research

Page 61

March 29-31, 2018

Vienna, Austria

Edition of International Conference on

Environmental Science

& Technology 2018

hetrendsofforestcoverchangeinLithuanianmunicipalitiesare

introduced in the current paper. Two sources of information on

the forest cover in 1950s and today (2013) were used in this study:

(i) a geographic forest cover database developed using historical

orthophotomaps based on aerial photography, which was carried

out in the period just after the World War II, and (ii) the information

originating from the State Forest Cadaster and referring to the

year 2013. These two layers were compared using GIS overlay

techniques. The data was made available for the analyses

aggregated up to the municipality level. The Global Moran’s I

statistic and Anselin Local Moran’s I were used to identify global

and local patterns in the distribution of forest cover characteristics

in Lithuanian municipalities, respectively. The main finding of this

study was that the proportion of the forest cover in 1950 was

26.5%, i. e. notably differing from the official statistics – 19.7%.

The proportion of the forest cover increased in all municipalities

during the period 1950–2013. The largest increase in forest cover

proportion was in the areas less suitable for agriculture. The

relatively largest areas of new forests were identified in the south-

eastern part of Lithuania, the deforestation was relatively slowest

around less forested municipalities, while the afforestation was

relatively slowest around the agricultural Pakruojis municipality.

Deforestation was most commonly associated with the forest

transformation into agricultural land, less often into scrublands or

waters.

Keywords — forest cover changes, afforestation, deforestation,

spatial statistics

Biography

Daiva juknelienė was a lecture at Institute of Land Management and Geo-

matics. Her research fields are land law, sustainable land management and

spatial planning. She was publishedmore than 20 papers in reputed journals

and has been serving as an editorial board member of repute.

THE SPATIAL PATTERN OF FOREST COVER CHANGES IN LITHUANIA DURING THE

SECOND HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Daiva Juknelienė, Gintautas Mozgeris, Jolanta Valčiukienė

and

Virginija Atkocevičienė

Aleksandras Stulginskis University, Lithuania

Daiva Juknelienė et al., J Environ Res, Volume 2