Ileana Pătru-Stupariu

Understanding landscape change using historical maps. Case study Sinaia, Romania

Abstract Please click here to download the map associated with this article. The aim of this study is to produce a long term analysis of land cover change in Sinaia (Romanian Southern Carpathians), based on a time series of five maps, realised in the years 1790, 1912, 1970, 1990 and 2009. The maps were digitised and for each of the corresponding time periods, the binary change map and the trajectory of change were generated. The maps were produced within a Geographical Information System (GIS) based on a land cover change derived from cartographic digitisation. The scale of the maps created is 1:100,000 and the area is 5727 ha. The comparison of the maps was completed by using appropriate quantitative techniques and documentary sources or subsequent studies. At a historical scale, the main phenomenon was that of forestation, which mainly occurred during the 19th century. In the first part of the 20th century, Sinaia developed as an elegant tourist location and during the second part of the century it became an urban centre, and this evolution left its mark on the landscape structure. Today, an increasing urban pressure can be identified, due to residential expansion and mass-tourism.

Maintaining Cultural and Natural Biodiversity in the Carpathian Mountain Ecoregion: Need for an Integrated Landscape Approach

Landscapes located in the periphery of economic development, such as in parts of the Carpathian ecoregion, host remnants of both near-natural ecosystems and traditional agricultural land use systems. Such landscapes are important both for in situ conservation of natural and cultural biodiversity, and as references for biodiversity restoration elsewhere in Europe. This paper first reviews the contemporary understanding of benchmarks for biodiversity conservation in terms of ecosystems with natural disturbance regimes and pre-industrial cultural landscapes. Second, after providing a historical background, we review the challenges to natural and cultural biodiversity conservation and discuss current development trajectories. Third, we provide concrete examples from six Carpathian areas with different proportions of natural and cultural biodiversity. Fourth, we discuss the need for a diversity of management systems toward protection, management and restoration, spatial planning, and multi-sector governance for conservation of natural and cultural landscapes’ biodiversity. Finally, we stress the need to encourage integration of management, planning and governance of social and ecological systems to maintain natural and cultural biodiversity. The natural vegetation of the Carpathian Mountains is mostly forests and woodlands. Natural disturbances as wind, snow, frost, fire and flooding as well as insects and fungi resulted in forests characterized by old and large trees, diverse horizontal and vertical structures, and large amounts of dead wood in various stages of decay. While some near-natural forests remain, in most of the Carpathian ecoregion pre-industrial cultural landscapes evolved. Human use created traditional village system with infield houses, gardens, fields, meadows and outfield meadows and pastures, and woodlands which not only provide ecosystem services but also represent cultural heritage. The maintenance of natural and cultural biodiversity may require active management of species, habitats and processes. However, designing management systems that emulate natural and cultural landscape’s disturbance regimes is a major challenge requiring collaboration of private, public and civic sector stakeholders, and integration of social and ecological systems. Maintaining and restoring the traditional village system’s social capital as well as functional networks of protected areas and implementing sustainable forest management in managed forests are thus crucial. The Carpathian ecoregion forms a quasi-experiment with new country borders that have created stark contrasts among regions regarding natural and cultural biodiversity. This ecoregion can therefore be seen as a landscape-scale laboratory for systematic studies of interactions between ecological and social systems to support the development of an integrated landscape approach to biodiversity conservation and cultural heritage.

What is the spatial link between the Roman civilisation and cultural landscape in Romania

Exploring the dimensions of landscape history, particularly those reflected in the present spatial reconfiguration, requires the use of models to facilitate its evaluation. Considering heritage as a contemporary production result, in this paper the traces of Roman colonisation in the landscape are apprehended in regard to the present time. More precisely, we focused on the southern Romanian territory which was located at the periphery of the Roman Empire at the time of its maximum extent. Its peculiarity is that, even though it experienced a rather short organisation under the Roman administration, clear spatial traces emerge in the present cultural landscape. The identification of visible landmarks within the landscape was achieved through a combined framework of ancillary documents, cartographic material and archaeological gazetteer data, in an interdisciplinary attempt to produce a spatial correlation between the historical territorial planning and the present landscape. Thus, the most important results of the study include modelling the spatial pattern of Roman continuity in the present landscape.

Multiscale wavelet-based analysis to detect hidden geodiversity

Geodiversity, a relatively new concept in earth sciences, synthesizes information related to abiotic layers and indicates their spatial interactions and interrelations. Geodiversity has been used in mountainous areas to assess both their ecological and economic potential. In this paper, we link geodiversity analysis with a multi-resolution wavelet transform to parse the hidden patterns of geodiversity of a plateau area from the Swiss Jura Mountains. We decomposed a high-resolution digital terrain model using a fractional spline wavelet transform method into four coarser resolution images, ranging from 4 to 32 m, to detect image discontinuities. This generated directional high-pass coefficients, which accumulated in a bottom-up approach to determine the terrain roughness and extract obvious topographical features. In addition, we mapped and quantified total geodiversity using available geological, tectonical and topographical elements on a 32-m square grid. The geodiversity index of the area was computed by adding the terrain roughness derived from a wavelet transform to the traditional formula. The correlation among the geodiversity index, terrain roughness, elevation and slope data was tested with exploratory regression and Spatial Lag regression models. We obtained four images that represent the wavelet-detected terrain roughness at four levels of decomposition, ranging from 4 to 32 m. The geodiversity index, computed based on the wavelet-detected roughness, accurately refined the results obtained with the total geodiversity traditional formula. The distribution of the wavelet-detected topographical features was more heterogenic, with a coarser map resolution and forming areas that correspond to the mapped areas with the most obvious geodiversity patterns. Our findings provide a tool for detecting hidden geodiversity patterns within areas that lack apparent landscape variability, as well as for overcoming traditional methods for assessing geodiversity by introducing the multiscale fractional spline wavelet transform with accurate mapping of the terrain roughness.

A Double Landscape Shaped by a Century of Logging Industry and Resort Development on Prahova Valley and the Surrounding Mountains

The present paper investigates spatial connections between mountaineering, nature protection and logging industry in the Southern Carpathians. It inquires factors determining landscape changes, thus considering the role of mountaineering and tourism associations in supporting the establishment of protected areas.

Heuristic-driven graph wavelet modeling of complex terrain

We present a novel method for building a multi-resolution representation of large digital surface models. The surface points coincide with the nodes of a planar graph which can be processed using a critically sampled, invertible lifting scheme. To drive the lazy wavelet node partitioning, we employ an attribute aware cost function based on the generalized quadric error metric. The resulting algorithm can be applied to multivariate data by storing additional attributes at the graph’s nodes. We discuss how the cost computation mechanism can be coupled with the lifting scheme and examine the results by evaluating the root mean square error. The algorithm is experimentally tested using two multivariate LiDAR sets representing terrain surface and vegetation structure with different sampling densities.