Landscape Development and Climate Change in Southwest Bulgaria (Pirin Mountains)
Landscape Development and Climate Change in Southwest Bulgaria aims to address some of the current limitations in our understanding of past Balkan climate and environment. High mountains and their ecosystems offer an outstanding opportunity for studies on
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Karsten Grunewald Jörg Scheithauer ●
Landscape Development and Climate Change in Southwest Bulgaria (Pirin Mountains)
Karsten Grunewald Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regional Development Dresden Germany [email protected]
Jörg Scheithauer Landscape Research Centre Dresden Germany [email protected]
ISBN 978-90-481-9958-7 e-ISBN 978-90-481-9959-4 DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-9959-4 Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
Tell me the past and I’ll see the future. Confucius
Southeast Europe, the Balkans and not least the southwest Bulgarian Pirin region experienced an eventful natural and cultural history covering a time scale from millenia to the decades of the Younger Past, which has to be decrypted. Information on the Pirin mountains, stored in geo-archives, has been examined using modern methods and with great effort. This monograph seeks to summarize information on landscape and climate development in the region. For the Holocene period, the last 10,000 years or so, the forest and climate history of the mountain regions was reconstructed using pollen analysis of lake sediments and peat. The extensive work of Bulgarian colleagues was analyzed and supplemented with soil surveys. Our examination focused on an archive network in the Alpine timberline zone of the northern Pirins. This network provides tree-ring analyses of centuries-old soil and moraine investigations, firn and ice layers of recent glaciers, and culturalhistory inquiries, as well as analyses of relatively long-time climate data series. Thus, the climate, including its extremes, can be described in relatively high resolution, for the last 500 years. The studies were conducted with the support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), as well as the administration of Pirin National Park. We wish to thank our co-workers and colleagues, namely Sieglinde Gerstenhauer, Alexander Gikov, Bjorn Günther, Dr. Gerhard Helle, Alexander Hennig, Dr. Jürgen König, Dr. Christiana Weber, Thomas Wieloch, Beate Winkler, and students too numerous to be named here, for their assistance with digging and drilling, mapping, sampling and lab analyses. A German version of the book was published first (www.rhombos.de). We thank Mr. Reiser for helping us with the authorisation chores.
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Preface
Anne Scheithauer, Laura Grunewald and Silka Halmel: thank you for helping with the English text. Actual developments and findings were incorporated by u
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