Ruderalization and invasive species spread as a consequences of land abandonment in European landscapes after 1990: detection and assessment using remote sensing
Motivation and Objective
Cultural landscapes are the result of long-term human–environment interaction. The opposite developments of intensification and extensification of cultural landscapes in Europe lead to considerable polarization of land use. Therein, extensification and farmland abandonment is a complex multi-dimensional process with environmental, ecological, economic and societal consequences. Negative consequences regard, among others, the ruderalization and expansion of invasive species, finally leading to the decline of biodiversity. Remote sensing with its increasing spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions has become a powerful tool for detection and assessment of land abandonment and its consequences. The interdisciplinary project team will use this to advance research on the topic, spanning the fields of remote sensing, geography, biology and social sciences.
Assessment of different stages of land abandonment regarding the vegetation structure using multi-source remote sensing and 3D geodata acquisition from different platforms and sensors.
The aim of the 4EU+ project is to strengthen the partner network focusing on international and interdisciplinary research of various aspects and impacts of farmland abandonment across Europe. New strategies of using and combining remote sensing data will be tested. Methods will be investigated for the detection and assessment of processes linked to land abandonment, especially ruderalization and the spread of invasive species. The approaches will be evaluated for different case studies of land abandonment consequences in selected European countries.
Background
This collaboration project is funded in the framework of the 4EU+ programme of the European Union with Lucie Kupková (Department of Applied Geoinformatics and Cartography, Charles University Prague) as PI of the project and Heidelberg University, University of Copenhagen, University of Warsaw, University of Geneva, and the Slovak Academy of Science as project partners. It follows the alliance built up through the E-TRAINEE strategic partnership project in the framework of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union and the 4EU+ collaboration project Farmland Abandonment in Europe.
