Land-use legacies and forest change
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EDITORIAL
Land-use legacies and forest change Matteo Garbarino
. Peter J. Weisberg
Received: 11 October 2020 / Accepted: 15 October 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
The importance of land-use legacies for shaping contemporary landscape patterns and processes and for informing landscape management has been widely recognized for at least two decades (Bu¨rgi et al. 2017; Foster et al. 2003), although research on the topic has accelerated dramatically in recent years. From a literature survey based on the WOS database and the search sentence ALL = (‘‘land-use legac*’’ OR ‘‘land use legac*’’ AND forest*) we found 279 published papers for the period 1985–2020. Statistically speaking these papers reached an H-index of 40 and a total amount of citations of 6591. An increasing trend of published papers on this topic is not surprising (from 1 in 1994 to 30 per year between 2018 and 2020), yet the level of increasing interest from the scientific community has been remarkable, as demonstrated by the astonishing increase of citations per year (Fig. 1). Almost 16% of the selected papers were published by the journals Forest Ecology and Management, Landscape Ecology and Ecological
M. Garbarino (&) Department of Agricultural, Forest and Food Sciences, University of Torino, Largo Braccini 2, IT, 10095 Grugliasco, TO, Italy e-mail: [email protected] P. J. Weisberg Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Science, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, NV 89557, USA
Applications, but the variability of the disciplines involved highlights the strongly transdisciplinary character of this topic. This Special Section is focused on how forest landscape history, arising from past land-use, constrains and shapes the future forest response to disturbance, management, and global change. The Special Section includes a subset of a diverse mix of 24 papers from around the world presented at the recent World IALE 2019 conference, encompassing both modeling and empirical approaches to understanding how landscape change in future is strongly dependent upon historical land-use legacies. Although the Special Section is mainly focused on forests, it also includes papers that explore the implications of landuse legacy for non-forested systems, as well as for landscape mosaics that incorporate multiple vegetation types. Finally, it includes works that consider land-use legacies over a range of time spans, including from prehistoric times using paleoecological approaches, as well as from historical times. Ecologists commonly focus their attention on natural ecosystems, in which the ecological pattern and process under study is not disturbed by the ‘‘fuzziness’’ introduced by human activities. However, in several parts of the world the effects of repeated human action have resulted in cultural landscapes that are predominantly defined by the anthropogenic
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Landscape Ecol
Fig. 1 Number of citations per year for the 1995–2020 period extracted from the WOS database by using the query ‘AL
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