Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society 41: 23-30, doi: 10.3897/jbgs.2019.41.4
Large-scale mapping and analysis of changes in contemporary landscapes over a 50-year period in the key area "Bogdaia", northwestern Rila Mountains
Alexander Gikov‡‡ Space Research and Technology Institute - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
© Alexander Gikov. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Gikov A (2019) Large-scale mapping and analysis of changes in contemporary landscapes over a 50-year period in the key area "Bogdaia", northwestern Rila Mountains. Journal of the Bulgarian Geographical Society 41: 23-30. https://doi.org/10.3897/jbgs.2019.41.4 |  |
Abstract
Maps of contemporary landscapes for 1966, 1980, 1997 and 2016 in key area "Bogdaia" have been made by processing and visual interpretation of historical aerial photographs and recent satellite imagery. The identified changes in the study area show that there is a clear trend of increasing the area of forest landscapes and decreasing the area of grass landscapes which are of secondary origin. For the same period, the transitional forest-shrub landscapes show fluctuations without a clear trend. The restoration of natural forest landscapes is explained by the changed land use and the almost complete lack of grazing in recent years. The process of natural forest landscapes restoration is more active in the coniferous landscape belt and on slopes with northern exposure while in the lower deciduous belt and on slopes with southern exposure component it is slower.
Keywords
Landscape dynamics, Landscape maps, Historical aerial photographs, Rila Mountains