Ancient forest statistics provide centennial perspective over the status and dynamics of forest area in France
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RESEARCH PAPER
Ancient forest statistics provide centennial perspective over the status and dynamics of forest area in France Timothée Audinot 1,2
&
Holger Wernsdörfer 2 & Jean-Daniel Bontemps 1
Received: 3 April 2020 / Accepted: 16 July 2020 # INRAE and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract & Key message Centenary forest statistics informing major attributes of French forests were digitized, checked for consistency, and used to infer forest dynamics. Comparison to forest inventory data highlights increases in forest area and tree diversity, and substantial maturation of forests. Dataset access at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3739458 & 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. Keywords Historical data . National forest inventory . Forest dynamic . Land-use change . Forest structure . Tree diversity
1 Introduction As an outcome of past demographic transition and industrial revolution, most European countries have been experiencing a forest transition since the nineteenth century, consisting of a Handling Editor: Marco Ferretti * Timothée Audinot [email protected] Holger Wernsdörfer [email protected] Jean-Daniel Bontemps [email protected] 1
IGN, Laboratoire d’Inventaire Forestier, 14 rue Girardet, 54000 Nancy, France
2
Université de Lorraine, AgroParisTech, INRAE, SILVA, F-54000 Nancy, France
strong regain of forest area (Mather 1992; Meyfroidt and Lambin 2011). While present forests’ state has been accurately documented since 1990 with implementation of Forest Europe reporting (Forest Europe 2015) and the increasing implementation of statistical national forest inventory (NFI) programs across Europe (Tomppo et al. 2010), forest dynamics over more ancient time periods remains poorly covered (Mather et al. 1999; Meyfroidt and Lambin 2011). This has prevented from elaborating a clear view on the nature and dynamic of forest chan
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