Mihai Daniel Nita

Transylvania University of Brașov | unitbv · Forest Engineering, Forest Management and Terrestrial Measurements Laboratory

Common beech (Fagus sylvatica L.) is one of Europe's most widespread forest tree species. In the actual context of climate change, this species has responded through its self-regulation mechanisms, proving a high plasticity. It is important to explore the specific mechanisms driving its response to climate change, taking into account silvicultural,...

Global forests face increasing threats from deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change, necessitating innovative tools for effective monitoring and management. Traditional forest monitoring methods, which rely heavily on manual fieldwork and labor-intensive data processing, are often inadequate for addressing the scale and complexity of t...

Forest attributes such as the standing stock, diameter at the breast height, tree height, and basal area, are essential in forest management. Conventional estimation methods, which are still largely used in many parts of the world, are typically resource intensive. Machine learning algorithms working with remotely sensed data trained by ground meas...

This study examines disturbances in the Pecineagu watershed forests over the last 50 years. The primary objective of this study is to comprehensively assess the intensity and consequences of canopy disturbances in the Pecineagu watershed forests over the past half-century. Utilizing meta-analysis and advanced remote sensing techniques, including sa...

The accurate estimation of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) derived from satellite data is critical for numerous environmental applications. This study evaluates the accuracy and reliability of two satellite-derived elevation models, the ALOS World 3D and SRTM DEMs, specifically for their application in hydrological modeling. A comparative analysis...

Accurate estimation of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) derived from satellite data is critical for numerous environmental applications. This study evaluates the accuracy and reliability of two satellite-derived elevation models, ALOS World 3D and SRTM DEMs, specifically for their application in hydrological modeling. A comparative analysis with Ter...

Remote sensing data are important for assessing ecological change, but their value is often restricted by their limited temporal coverage. Major historical events that affected the environment, such as those associated with colonial history, World War II, or the Green Revolution are not captured by modern remote sensing. In the present article, we...

The goal of the study is to test a methodology that outputs continuous sets of data by integrating forest canopy height satellite measurements in a Random Forest (RF) algorithm. We assess the performance of the two spaceborne LiDAR missions by comparing them to field measurements taken with a mobile LiDAR scanner (MLS), then we test the compatibili...

Forest nationalization policies in developing countries have often led to a reduction in local forest ownership rights and short- or long-term exploitative behaviors of stakeholders. The purpose of this research is to quantify the effect of Iran’s Forest Nationalization Law (FNL) in a part of Zagros Forest over a 68-year time period (1955–2022) usi...

Historical land use strongly influences current landscapes and ecosystems making maps of historical land cover an important reference point. However, the earliest satellite-based land cover maps typically date back to the 1980s only, after 30-m Landsat data became available. Our goal was to develop a methodology to automatically map land cover for...

Kakamega National Forest Reserve is a tropical forest ecosystem at high risk of irreplaceable biodiversity loss due to persistent human-induced pressures. The aim of this paper is to assess the effect of fragmentation and forest cover loss on forest ecosystems in Kakamega National Forest Reserve, with the objectives: (1) to quantify the forest cove...

The use of electronics, close-range sensing and artificial intelligence has changed the management paradigm in many of the current industries in which big data analytics by automated processes has become the backbone of decision making and improvement [...]

In mountainous or hilly areas, the slope aspect affects the amount of solar radiation, with direct consequences on species distribution and tree growth. However, little is known on how the tree shape and volume allometry may be affected by contrasting environmental conditions driven by the slope aspect. This study aims to investigate whether the sl...

Climate-Smart Forestry is a sustainable forest management approach for increasing these positive climate impacts on society (Verkerk et al. 2020). In response to climate change, the approach intends to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, adapt forest management to create resilient forests, and focus on active forest management with the goal of sustain...

Climate-smart forestry is a sustainable forest management approach for increasing positive climate impacts on society. As climate-smart forestry is focusing on more sustainable solutions that are resource-efficient and circular, digitalization plays an important role in its implementation. The article aimed to validate an automatic workflow of proc...

High‐conservation‐value forests (HCVFs) are critically important for biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning, but they face many threats. Where systematic HCVF inventories are missing, such as in parts of Eastern Europe, these forests remain largely unacknowledged and therefore often unprotected. We devised a novel, transferable approach fo...

Post-WWII displacements in the Polish Carpathians resulted in widespread land abandonment. Most of the pre-war agricultural areas are now covered with secondary forests, which will soon reach the felling age. Mapping their exact cover is crucial to investigate succession–regeneration processes and to determine their role in the landscape, before ma...

Long term analyses on habitat dynamics are challenging when data from the past is scarce. In addition, large scale perspectives are difficult to attain without proper modelling of habitat conditions. These drawbacks were overcome in the case of capercaillie in Romania with the help of satellite-based information and by finding relevant environmenta...

The accuracy of the description regarding tree architecture is crucial for data processing. LiDAR technology is an efficient solution for capturing the characteristics of individual trees. The aim of the present study was to analyze tree shape variability in a mixed oak forest consisting of four European white oak species: Quercus petraea, Q. frain...

Dynamics of habitat conditions drive important changes in distribution and abundance of animal species making monitoring an important but also a challenging task when data from the past are scarce. We compared the distribution of ant mounds in the 1960s with recent inventories (2018), looking at changes in canopy cover over time, in a managed fores...

Carbon storage and sequestration is one of the most important services provided by forest ecosystems, the most powerful tools for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Its value is not always captured and appreciated at a fair level, with people taking for granted these benefits provided by the ecosystems. Our first objective was to evaluate th...

After 1991, major events, such as the collapse of socialism and the transition to market economies, caused land use change across the former USSR and affected forests in particular. However, major land use changes may have occurred already during Soviet rule, but those are largely unknown and difficult to map for large areas because 30-m Landsat da...

Agricultural expansion drives biodiversity loss globally, but impact assessments are biased towards recent time periods. This can lead to a gross underestimation of species declines in response to habitat loss, especially when species declines are gradual and occur over long time periods. Using Cold War spy satellite images (Corona), we show that a...

Romania, due to its geographical location, is characterized by an increased level of biodiversity in a high number of ecological systems capable of providing a wide range of ecological services. Ensuring the connectivity of these systems is a fundamental issue for maintaining a high level of natural values. The identification of ecological corridor...

The management of torrential flood risk areas located in natural protected sites requires special approaches. Also, those processes can cause casualties and damage socioeconomic structures (roads, railways, houses, etc.) The processes intercept protected landscapes, sometimes endangering protected species and habitats. The restoration of the stream...

Modern bioenergy crops have the potential to play a crucial role in the global energy mix, especially under policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The management of willow short rotation crops involves a suite of operations that aim to deliver the biomass for different uses. In commercial scale applications, high-performance, mostly automated...

Land cover is one of the key terrestrial variables used for monitoring and as input for modelling in support of achieving the United Nations Strategical Development Goals. Global and Continental Land Cover Products (GCLCs) aim to provide the required harmonized information background across areas; thus, they are not being limited by national or oth...

Despite numerous positive achievements, the institutional reforms in the forest sector in Central and EasternEuropean countries are still facing numerous problems. In Romanian case, the relatively new created ForestInspectorates (FI) have not reached the initial expectations of applying and monitoring the forest-specific reg-ulations. Theory of Plan...

Forest policies and management rules imposed on forests in Romania provide favourable habitat conditions formany species across forest landscapes. This is empirically proven by the high biodiversity of the Carpathians andtheir surroundings. However, they do not explicitly address the spatial arrangement of forest patches acrosslandscapes. Therefore...

Wars have major economic, political and human implications, and they can strongly affect environment and land use, not only during the conflicts, but also afterwards. However, data on the land use effects of wars is sparse, especially for World War II, the largest war in history. Our goal was to quantify and understand the time-lagged land use effe...

Trees have been around for more than 370 million years, and today there are about 80 thousand species of them, occupying 3.5 billion hectares worldwide, including 250 million ha of commercial plantations. While forests can provide tremendous environmental, social, and economic benefits to nations, they also affect the hydrologic cycle in different...

Trees have been around for more than 370 million years, and today there are about 80 thousand species of them, occupying 3.5 billion hectares worldwide, including 250 million ha of commercial plantations. While forests can provide tremendous environmental, social, and economic benefits to nations, they also affect the hydrologic cycle in different...

In the last decades, the altitudinal and latitudinal advancement of forest lines has increased due to global warming and the abandonment of less productive areas previously subject to agricultural activities. The intensity and speed of the forest line advancement depend also on numerous physical, biological and human factors that are region-specifi...

The paper aims to explore whether long run benefits can be obtained through the sustainable management of forest ecosystems within protected areas when compared to immediate benefits of doing business as usual. Total economic value of forest ecosystems services is estimated using commonly used valuation techniques under the innovative umbrella of t...

The role of forest ecosystems in providing benefits to the population is well known. In the context of developing the society the pressure on natural resources has becoming more acute challenging the provision of these services at a level which will ensure a proper human welfare. Even if the concept of the ecosystem services approach is not new, it...

Quantification of geomorphological changes and rates of landscape evolution is a matter of primary importance, as much in natural hazards studies as in calibration of landscape evolution models. In this paper it is investigated the influence of dams to morphological processes on a corrected torrential valley situated in mountainous area of Romania....

In the last two decades different methodologies for assessing the economic implications of protected areas have been developed within the framework of “Total Economic Value”, taking into account not only goods and services that have a price and a market but also those not priced or marketed. The present paper, by using a number of recognized method...

Forest roads network development has several implications economical and ecological. Using GIS allows using large data sets and offers the opportunity to have a better approach incorporating information into a unitary system. The aim of this article is to underline the increasing accessibility and usefulness of GIS programs in road network developm...

Ecosystem services addressed in this paper include wood production associated with the active management of forests and the value of non-timber forest products and hunting (i.e. direct use values of the protected areas) carried out in and around three of the most important protected areas in Romania. In order to provide information that supports de...

Nacrtak This paper examines a new approach to forest accessibility planning based on a GIS road de-velopment algorithm and some topographically derived indices. The aim of the paper is to propose and validate a method of assessing forest accessibility introducing an ecological ap-proach, based on morphological impact. For the case study, both carto...

The torrentiality degree is a useful indicator in classifying the priority of the proposed torrent control activities in torrential watershed management. The paper analyses and proposes a method for estimation of torrentiality degree of a small torrential watershed, which is improved by using geospatial referenced data incorporated in a geographic...

The usage of terrestrial photogrammetry is also known nowadays, in most of cases, as terrestrial scanner application. In this paper a stereo matching 3D algorithm is presented in order to use it in monitoring the torrent control structures. The present paper objective is to highlight the possibilities of terrestrial photogrammetry. In the studied c...

This paper examines a new approach to the monitoring of the torrent control structures, which is based on mathematical-statistical research of the frequency and magnitude of the behavioural events recorded during the functional period of these structures. The research material consists of the transverse hydrotechnical works placed in 21 managed tor...

This paper proposes a new method based on FCD (Forest Cover Density) model, which maps the vegetation taking into consideration the canopy density. The critical analysis of well-known methods from Romanian literature, concluded that the age and stand consistency are the main factors in hydrological mapping of the vegetation. In the new technique we...

After 20-25 years from building the hydrotechnical structures for managing the hydrographic torrential network on the Tărlung Valley, the event of uncontrolled installation of forest vegetation on the central corridor of flow, upstream the structure, has developed on a surface of approximately 110 m 2 on average. The average blocking degree of the...

During the 20-25 years from their startup, the torrential hydrographical management works carried out in the upper Tărlung Watershed (55 dams, 22 sills, 25 traverses and 4 outlet canals) have exposed a number of 24 behaviour event types: 13 out of them reduce the safety of exploitation and the sustainability of the works (hereinafter called damages...

Identifying the areas affected by windthrows has been proven to be difficult as influenced by new created special conditions. The use of remote sensing for mapping these areas facilitates and improves the method especially with the automation and diminution of human error. Windthrows were mapped using LANDSAT and ASTER satellite images before and a...