Katarzyna Ostapowicz

Norwegian Institute for Nature Research | NINA

In an increasingly human- and road-dominated world, the preservation of functional ecosystems has become highly relevant. While the negative ecological impacts of roads on ecosystems are numerous and well documented, roadless areas have been proposed as proxy for functional ecosystems. However, their potential remains underexplored, partly due to t...

The grasslands which are an important part of an ecosystem are endangered due toabandonment of traditional forms of land use. Preservation of biodiversity of semi-natural grassland communities is of great importance, therefore it is important to iden-tify threats and prepare a sustainable plan for their protection The goal of this studywas to devel...

A hyperspectral field sensor (FloX) was installed in Ad�ventdalen (Svalbard, Norway) in 2019 as part of the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS) for monitoring vegetation phenology and Sun-Induced Chlorophyll Fluorescence (SIF) of high-Arctic tundra. This northernmost hyperspectral sensor is located within the footprint of a tow...

Due to successful conservation initiatives and legislations, the grey wolf (Canis lupus) is recolonising its historic range in Europe. However, wolves have never been extirpated across large areas in Eastern Europe but are often constrained to remote and inaccessible places due to centuries of persecution. This study aimed to identify the potential...

Forest ecosystems significantly contribute to the global organic carbon (OC) pool, exhibiting high spatial heterogeneity in this respect. Some of the components of the OC pool in a forest (woody aboveground biomass (wAGB), coarse root biomass (CRB)) can be relatively easily estimated using readily available data from land observation and forest inv...

Information about forest stand species distribution is essential for biodiversity modelling, forest disturbances, fire hazard and drought monitoring, biomass and carbon estimation, detection of non-native and invasive species, as well as for planning forest management strategies. High temporal and spectral resolution remote sensing data from the Se...

Accurate information regarding forest tree species composition is useful for a wide range of applications, both for forest management and scientific research. Remote sensing is an efficient tool for collecting spatially explicit information on forest attributes. With the launch of the Sentinel-2 mission, new opportunities have arisen for mapping tr...

We produced the first spatially explicit, cross-border, digital map of long term (160 years) land use in the Carpathian Ecoregion, the Hungarian part of the Pannonian plains and the historical region of Moravia in the Czech Republic. We mapped land use in a regular 2x2 km point grid. Our dataset comprises of 91,310 points covering 365,240 km2 in se...

Accurate characterisation and land cover mapping is essential among others for planning and managing natural resources, modelling environmental variables, and for understanding distribution of habitats. Monitoring and mapping of land cover consistently and robustly over large areas is made possible with Earth Observation data. The increased availab...

Accurate mapping of forest stands composition is significant in a wide variety of applications, regarding both scientific and forest management issues. Forest inventory data is often not up-to-date or not accurate enough for the more detailed analysis. Therefore, satellite imagery can be an excellent source of information about forest tree species...

Mountain forest areas are key for providing a wide range of ecosystem services and are hot spots for land use change processes, in particular, increase in forest cover at the expense of mountain pastures and meadows. Mountain forest systems in eastern and western Europe have likely similar future socio-economic situations but significantly differen...

Historical land use may shape landscapes for centuries into the future, but it remains unclear how much land-use legacies affect contemporary land use. Knowing for how long and how strongly land-use legacies affect agricultural systems is important for contemporary land-use planning and conservation. We assessed the effect of nineteenth-century agr...

Understanding drivers of forest-cover change is essential for a broad range of ecosystem properties. In this work, we assessed changes in forest cover using physical, climatic and socio-economic drivers, including forest neighbourhood effects representing spatial interactions within and between two time periods (1880–1940; 1940–2010), for a mountai...

The Carpathian region represents an ideal showcase of several land change theories and their implications for conservation because this region shares the long geo-political and socio-economic history of Eastern Europe while also being a biodiversity hotspot. With a long history of abrupt socio-economic and institutional shifts , the Carpathians exe...

For more than 100 years, forest cover in Europe has increased substantially due to afforestation and natural forest expansion. The latter, resulting typically from farmland abandonment and subsequent secondary forest succession, has played a major role in marginal mountain areas and possesses various highly important environmental and economic cons...

This study aimed to obtain accurate binary forest masks which might be directly used in analysis of land cover changes over large areas. A sequence of image processing operations was conceived, parameterized and tested using various topographic maps from mountain areas in Poland and Switzerland. First, the input maps were filtered and binarized by...

Context. Connectivity assessments typically rely on resistance surfaces derived from habitat models, assuming that higher-quality habitat facilitates movement. This assumption remains largely untested though, and it is unlikely that the same environmental factors determine both animal movements and habitat selection, potentially biasing connectivit...

Reintroductions are an important tool for re-establishing or reinforcing populations of threatened species, and thus to restore ecosystems. However, predicting how reintroduced populations will spread is difficult, and past reintroductions often lacked a thorough assessment of habitat availability and connectivity. Using the case of reintroduced Eu...

Land cover change is one of the major contributors to global change, but long-term, broad-scale, detailed and spatially explicit assessments of land cover change are largely missing, although the availability of historical maps in digital formats is increasing. The problem often lies in efficiency of analyses of historical maps for large areas. Our...

Historic land use can exert strong land-use legacies, i.e., long-lasting effects on ecosystems, but the importance of land-use legacies, alongside other factors, for subsequent forest-cover change is unclear. If past land use affects rates of forest disturbance and afforestation then this may constrain land use planning and land management options,...

Manuscript received: May 29, 2014 Revised version: July 29, 2014 kaim d., kozak j., ostaFin k., dobosz m., ostapowicz k., kolecka n., gimmi u., 2014. Uncertainty in historical land-use reconstructions with topographic maps. Quaestiones Geographicae 33(3), Bogucki Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Poznań, pp. 55–63, 2 tables, 4 figs. DOI 10.2478/quageo-2014-0029...

Assessing landscape connectivity is impor-tant to understand the ecology of landscapes and to evaluate alternative conservation strategies. The ques-tion is though, how to quantify connectivity appropri-ately, especially when the information available about the suitability of the matrix surrounding habitat is limited. Our goal here was to investiga...

Detailed knowledge of forest cover dynamics is crucial for many applications from resource management to ecosystem service assessments. Landsat data provides the necessary spatial, temporal and spectral detail to map and analyze forest cover and forest change processes. With the opening of the Landsat archive, new opportunities arise to monitor for...

Detailed knowledge of forest cover dynamics is crucial for many applications from resource management to ecosystem service assessments. Landsat data provides the necessary spatial, temporal and spectral detail to map and analyze forest cover and forest change processes. With the opening of the Landsat archive, new opportunities arise to monitor for...

The Carpathians are a very distinct mountain chain and a major landscape landmark in the core of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The Carpathians are characterized by valuable biological resources and a rich cultural heritage that is of high importance for the Carpathian countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovaki...

The Carpathian Mountains represent a complex system with various factors influencing synergies between environmental and human subsystems of the entire region. Understanding these natural and social processes and phenomena requires access to and use of high quality and accurate data, sophisticated technologies, and methods. In particular, developme...

The Carpathians are a distinct mountain chain in the core of Central and Eastern Europe holding valuable biological resources and a rich cultural heritage. The last twenty years have witnessed an increasing awareness of the Carpathians’ value for European society and strengthened research cooperation in the region, especially after the enlargement...

The Carpathian region had a rich and diverse history during the last 200 years, with patterns and drivers of land change for the region as a whole remaining still largely unexplored. We aim to investigate land use and land cover change (LULCC) and its drivers acrossthe study area. We created an inventory of existing LULCC case studies, and carried...

Habitat connectivity is important for the survival of species that occupy habitat patches too small to sustain an isolated population. A prominent example of such a species is the European bison (Bison bonasus), occurring only in small, isolated herds, and whose survival will depend on establishing larger, well-connected populations. Our goal here...

Habitat connectivity is important for the survival of species that occupy habitat patches too small to sustain an isolated population. A prominent example of such a species is the European bison (Bison bonasus), occurring only in small, isolated herds, and whose survival will depend on establishing larger, well-connected populations. Our goal here...

Land use is a critical factor in the global carbon cycle, but land-use effects on carbon fluxes are poorly understood in many regions. One such region is Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where land-use intensity decreased substantially after the collapse of socialism, and farmland abandonment and forest expansion have been widespread. Ou...

European Bison (Bison bonasus) barely escaped extinction in the early 20th century and now only occur in small isolated herds scattered across Central and Eastern Europe. The species’ survival in the wild depends on identifying suitable habitat for establishing bison metapopulations via reintroductions of new herds. We assessed European Bison habit...

In the paper, we described the methodology enabling automatic land cover pattern change analysis, using satellite data. We relied on the post-classification comparison technique with the classification process based on a supervised approach, joining image segmentation, knowledge-based rules to extract a training set, and the maximum likelihood deci...

The Carpathian Mountains in Europe are a biodiversity hot spot; harbor many relatively undisturbed ecosystems; and are still rich in seminatural, traditional landscapes. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Carpathians have experienced widespread land use change, affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Climate change, as an additional dri...

An objective and reliable assessment of wildlife movement is important in theoretical and applied ecology. The identification and mapping of landscape elements that may enhance functional connectivity is usually a subjective process based on visual interpretations of species movement patterns. New methods based on mathematical morphology provide a...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the main trends in land use change in the last thirty years of the 20th century in the Carpathians, based on the assessment of change in three communities: Niedźwiedź, Szczawnica and Trzciana. The research focused on two points in time; the 1970s and the year 2003. The sources of information about land use in the...

Assessing and monitoring landscape pattern structure from multi-scale land-cover maps can utilize morphological spatial pattern analysis (MSPA), only if various influences of scale are known and taken into account. This paper lays part of the foundation for applying MSPA analysis in landscape monitoring by quantifying scale effects on six classes o...

The aim of the study was to elaborate a methodology for forest mapping based on high resolution satellite data, relevant for reporting on forest cover and spatial pattern changes in Europe. The Carpathians were selected as a case study area and mapped using 24 Landsat scenes, processed independently with a supervised approach combining image segmen...

This study focuses on forest monitoring at landscape level on the basis of a methodology combining satellite data mapping and image morphological processing. It aims to contribute to reporting on trends of forest fragmentation and connectivity, by using forest spatial pattern metrics. The Carpathians were selected as a study area. For five case stu...

SUMMARY The aim of the paper is to present the statistical methods and the spatial analysis, which are used to quantitative and qualitative description of different land cover type changes and also to analyze the associated influence of natural and anthropogenic factors. The chosen type of land cover is forest in the western part of Karpaty Mts.. A...

Land abandonment was studied in the Beskid Mały Mts in southern Poland, in a typical Beskidian catchment with a mosaic of small, privately owned farms made up of numerous parcels. In this area, as in the whole mountain range, land abandonment processes have been observed for several tens of years. The process, which reflects political, economical a...

The complexity of the shapes of areas, also forest areas, is the effect of interaction between natural and anthropogenic factors (internal and external). Interactions between these factors determinate the shape of research objects to a various degree. We observe a general dependence of the size of the complications of the shapes of considered areas...

Spatially explicit modeling approaches have been successfully applied to analysis of land use and cover change (LUCC). Theories and methods of LUCC modelling include economic theories, spatial interactions, cellular automata, statistical analysis, optimisation techniques, rule-based simulation or multi-agent models (Koomen, Stillwell, 2007). The ai...