Ancient forest statistics provide centennial perspective over the status and dynamics of forest area in France
2020
Audinot, Timothée | Wernsdörfer, Holger | Bontemps, Jean-Daniel | SILVA (SILVA) ; AgroParisTech-Université de Lorraine (UL)-Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement (INRAE) | Laboratoire d'Inventaire Forestier (LIF) ; Université de Lorraine (UL)-École nationale des sciences géographiques (ENSG) ; Institut National de l'Information Géographique et Forestière [IGN] (IGN)-Université Gustave Eiffel-Institut National de l'Information Géographique et Forestière [IGN] (IGN)-Université Gustave Eiffel | ANR-11-LABX-0002,ARBRE,Recherches Avancées sur l'Arbre et les Ecosytèmes Forestiers(2011)
International audience
Show more [+] Less [-]English. Context: The history of European forest dynamic remains fragmental. In France, the Daubrée statistics (1908) and agricultural statistics (1892, 1929) formed fundamental material to fill this gap.Aims: Release, test, and summarize the digitalized dataset. Analyze long-term forest changes in forest area, composition, and structure.Methods: Primary data on forest area across NUTS-3 geographic units, split by forest management and ownership categories and dominating tree species (Daubrée), were digitized and cross-compared. Centennial changes in forest attributes were assessed from modern forest inventory data.Results: Cross-comparison revealed: (1) strong temporal consistency in forest changes over time, (2) systematic and interpretable biases in ownership/management categories between Daubrée and agricultural statistics. Strong shift from coppices to high forests, increased prevalence of private ownership, and constant proportion of broadleaf- and conifer-dominated forests were highlighted, with increased tree species diversity at country scale.Conclusion: Ancient statistics are shown to play a major role in retrospective land-use and forest policy analysis.
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