Land use history of the Bátorliget Mire Reserve and its surroundings

Abstract

Here we report on reconstructed vegetation changes in the Bátorliget Mire Reserve and its surroundings during the last 200 years. For this, first we digitized earlier maps of the area by using geographic information software, and then the maps were provided with uniform legends. The obtained time series revealed that the environs of Bátorliget were covered by forests, mires and swamps until the late 19th century. The expansion of arable land have begun about that time and reached its greatest extent in the 1920s and 1930s, when most of the mires and swamps have been drained, and the majority of forests been cut down. Up to the present, the area of croplands decreased considerably, while original forests have been replaced by plantations of alien trees. The surviving seminatural habitats have become largely fragmented due to these processes. Our results in the area of the Mire Reserve indicate that landscape transformation started earlier and was more drastic than it was assumed before.