Digital reconstruction of mid-16th century forests in the Western Carpathians using archival written documents

Abstract

In the mid-16th century, the mountains of the central part of the Western Carpathians (the territory of today’s Slovakia) belonged to significant mining areas in the then Kingdom of Hungary and the world. The surrounding forests provided important raw materials for mining, metallurgy, and other widely developed economic activities. Man significantly transformed the landscape on the southern slopes of the Low Tatras through logging and charcoal burning, and many locations were strongly disturbed. A significant factor in the disturbances of the forests in these mountains was the grazing (Wallachian colonization) of many flocks of sheep and goats directly in the forests. Cartographic material for research on the historical landscape from this period is very fragmented or does not exist at all. The area’s first modern large-scale topographic and mining maps appeared more than 200 years later. Based on a critical content analysis of the underlying minutes for Maximilian’s Forest Order from 1563, we used geographic information systems to digitize the spatial extension of the forest on the southern slopes of the Dumbier Tatras into the resulting maps and 3D models, including a map of natural forest reconstruction before human intervention. These records contain incomplete but rare descriptions of the distribution and the tree species composition, age and condition of the forest because the first modern topographic maps describing the landscape cover in the studied area appeared only at the end of the 18th century.