Péter Szabó

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• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Botany

The COST EU-PoTaRCh Action establishes a network focused on the past, present, and future significance, production, and use of major forest by-products in Europe and beyond. The Action centers around forest by-products—primarily potash, tar, resin, and charcoal (PoTaRCh), along with plant extracts—which have been produced and utilized for over 100,...

Grasslands above the timberline in European high mountains, such as the Alps, have been used as summer pasture for millennia, creating diverse ecosystems of high conservation value. However, the historical ecology of natural grasslands in middle mountains is much less known. We combined archival and palaeoecological sources to understand the manage...

ABSTRACT: Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloe...

Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 yr. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or underrep...

Like one of the ancient trees he wrote about so elegantly and perceptively, Oliver Rackham’s roots run deep while his influence branches far. He was undoubtedly the leading scholar in landscape history and historical ecology, and his work continues to resonate not just with his peers but with a much wider public audience too. His combination of ext...

In recent decades, there has been a growing number of studies exploring the historical dimensions of the interconnectedness of human societies and the environment. A core approach in this field is historical ecology. We analyzed 544 historical-ecological papers to assess patterns and trends in the field. We found a high degree of interdisciplinarit...

Publikace zaměřená na ochranu lesní biodiverzity přibližuje, jak se historicky proměnila lesní stanoviště v evropských podmínkách a jakým způsobem to ovlivnilo organismy, které lesy, případně stromy, potřebují ke svému životu. Kniha obsahuje popis tradičních praktik, ale i stručné návody pro ekologickou obnovu stanovišť.

Coppicing is a form of forest management in European broadleaved forests. While it is still practised in south-eastern Europe, in central and western Europe it was almost completely replaced by high forest management. Currently, there are increasing efforts to reintroduce coppice management into former coppice woods. However, little comprehensive k...

Historical ecology draws on a broad range of information sources and methods to provide insight into ecological and social change, especially over the past ~12,000 years. While its results are often relevant to conservation and restoration, insights from its diverse disciplines, environments, and geographies have frequently remained siloed or under...

The Thirty Years' War, which took place from 1618 to 1648 CE, was an armed military conflict in Europe. It resulted from the culmination of theological differences between advocates of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as a power struggle for European political hegemony. This war brought about extensive devastation to Europe. Base...

Traditional agroforestry on agricultural land was common in the past in Central Europe. However, much less is known about agroforestry on forested land, especially because it was often banned by forestry authorities during the 20th century. We used data from the so-called stable cadastre to map the occurrence of agroforestry uses (litter raking, ha...

The Thirty Years’ War, which took place from 1618 to 1648 CE, was an armed military conflict in Europe. It resulted from the culmination of contradictions between advocates of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches during the 17th-century reformation, as well as a power struggle for European political hegemony. This war brought about extensive...

Based on documentary evidence, a chronology of bark beetle outbreaks in the Czech Republic from 1781 to 1963 CE was created, continuing from 1964 through 2021 by bark beetle salvage felling data. The spatial distribution of bark beetle events concentrates on the border mountains of Bohemia and in the northern parts of Moravia and Silesia. The tempo...

Coppicing was a widespread form of forest management in European broadleaved forests. While it is still practised in south-eastern Europe, in central and western Europe it was almost completely replaced by high forest management. Currently there are increasing efforts to reintroduce coppice management into former coppice woods. However, little comp...

Based on documentary evidence, a chronology of bark beetle outbreaks in the Czech Republic from 1781 to 1963 CE was created, continuing from 1964 through 2021 by bark beetle salvage felling data. The spatial distribution of bark beetle events concentrates on the border mountains of Bohemia and in the northern parts of Moravia and Silesia. The tempo...

The interest in re-implementing agroforestry (AF) in European agriculture due to its environmental benefits has been growing exponentially. We reviewed the historical background and the current state (extent, farmers’ perception, legislative support, and barriers) to evaluate the future perspectives of AF in Czechia by identifying the key factors h...

The development of settlement and building activity is the result of socioeconomic, political and demographic changes in the past. However, accurate information on temporal variation in building activity is rather limited. Dendrochronological databases containing dated historical wooden constructions provide an important resource. We used 6514 tree...

Longstanding demographic growth accompanied by rising settlement activities and development of industry led to an increasing demand on utilization of wood. Tree species were selected for their specific properties. As a consequence of regional differences of forest species composition, wood has become an extremely important trade commodity. Therefor...

Litter raking was a traditional forest use representing an interface between forestry and agriculture. In forest history, it has usually been presented as the harmful removal by peasants of biomass, which was gradually eliminated by foresters, leading to better forest preservation. Based on the example of an exceptionally well-documented case of il...

Medieval settlement history in Europe is a common topic in several scientific disciplines. Recently, Fanta et al. (2020) examined colonization processes in Bohemia through the comparison of archaeological evidence and historical records. They concluded that the first mentions of settlements in historical documents are not reliable sources for settl...

2003-ban felmérte a környezet-történet akkori állapotát, tanulmányát azzal kezdte, hogy optimista becslés szerint száz nyárra lenne szüksége, hogy végigolvasson valamennyi releváns művet, így amit ír, szükségszerűen a saját érdeklődését tükrözi. Az azóta eltelt majd két évtizedben a környezettörténeti irodalom (mint egyébként számos más tudományter...

Uhlířství, respektive pálení uhlí, představuje jedno z nejdůležitějších lesních řemesel, kdy zejména v raném novověku v souvislosti s rozšířením vysokých pecí dochází ke značnému rozvoji této aktivity. Do dnešních dob se stopy po této činnosti dochovaly v podobě uměle upravených plošin – milířišť. Těch naše lesy obsahují obrovské množství a až done...

Questions Coppice woods were once widespread in Europe. It is usually assumed that underwood tree taxon composition was not directly influenced by people, whereas especially Quercus was promoted among standard trees. However, no work has quantitatively tested these assumptions. Our main question was whether there were any patterns in our data to su...

Questions Recent studies have suggested that response patterns of species and phylogenetic diversity may differ. Here, we address the following questions: What are the most important drivers and is there a difference in the responses to environmental drivers between species and phylogenetic diversity? If so, which ecological mechanisms determine th...

A review of the historical ecology literature led us to the realization that there was an important gap in terms of recognized methodological procedures and techniques. Contributions along these lines are sparse. However, some publications (book chapters and papers), some of them case studies, contain methodological material of great interest. Ther...

The population boom-and-bust during the European Neolithic (7000–2000 BC) has been the subject of lively discussion for the past decade. Most of the research on this topic was carried out with help of summed radiocarbon probability distributions. We aim to reconstruct population dynamics within the catchment of a medium sized lake on the basis of i...

One of the most disastrous windstorms to take place over the Czech Lands occurred on the night of 26/27 October 1870. It is here analysed through the use of documentary data (narrative sources, newspapers, forestry journals, printed documents) and systematic meteorological observations (wind force and direction). ombining this evidence with informa...

Question European temperate forests have been managed for millennia, and this management has left a long‐lasting legacy in soil chemistry and plant species composition and diversity. One of the most common practices was the raking of leaf litter, which was used as bedding for farm animals. We asked, what is the legacy of historical litter raking fo...

European forests have been copiously documented for centuries. However, forest-related archival sources were rarely utilised to their full potential, mainly because of the difficulties in producing compatible data from large amounts of very different sources. Furthermore, analysing such data for larger areas in high resolution was hardly possible p...

The long-term relationship between windstorms and forest disturbances in the Czech Lands is analysed in this paper, covering a very long period of 215 years (1801–2015). Based on documentary evidence and instrumental records, long-term series of severe windstorms in the summer half-year (April–September) and in the winter halfyear (October–March) a...

An extreme windstorm that took place on 7 December 1868 in the Czech Lands is analysed by means of rich documentary evidence from narrative sources, damage records, forestry journals and newspapers. Early meteorological measurements and a numerical atmospheric reanalysis support the documentary reconstruction. The windstorm reached hurricane-force...

This paper addresses the course, extent, and impacts of a windstorm that occurred on 20–21 December 1740, in the Czech Lands. The analysis is based on documentary data included in chronicles, “books of memory”, memoirs, damage reports, urbaria, and cadastral records, as well as secondary sources. The windstorm started with a thunderstorm in the aft...

The colonization of European landscapes during and after the Middle Ages has been studied by historical geographers for more than a century. While many details of colonization processes are well understood, landscape-scale studies are largely missing not least because of the difficulties in obtaining compatible temporal data for thousands of villag...

Open oakwoods are ancient but currently vanishing plant communities of high conservation value. We studied the vegetation of Eurasian steppic oakwoods in the Czech Republic where they are at the westernmost outcrop of their potential distribution to understand ecosystem changes and their drivers in the period of modern environmental change. In 2012...

Temperate oak-dominated woodlands are plant communities characterized by relatively open canopy structure and often rich assemblages of light-demanding understory species. This vegetation prevailed in Central European lowlands during the early and middle Holocene. Where open woodlands persisted in later periods, several main factors might have prev...

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) o...

List of participants from Uppsala and Vancouver workshops. (DOCX)

Complete list of all questions submitted to New International Community for Historical Ecology (NICHE) organizers during the crowdsouring portion of research. (DOCX)

Environmental change can be viewed as the combined result of long-term processes and singular events. While long-term trends appear to be readily available for observation (in the form of temporal comparisons or space-for-time substitution), it is more difficult to gain information on singular events in the past, although these can be equally signi...

Several archaeological databases containing information on sites and finds in geographical space have been created in the Czech Republic since the 1990s. Due to partial decentralisation, the most prominent example – the Archaeological Database of Bohemia – was spatially restricted to the western part of the Czech Republic. Moravia and the Czech par...

Questions Did high densities of wild ungulates cause a decline in plant species richness in a temperate oak wood? How did species composition change after nearly five decades? Did ungulates facilitate the spread of ruderal species and supress endangered species? Did dispersal strategies play a role in these processes? Location Krumlov Wood, SE Cze...

This paper examines the possibilities of creating quantified models of past human activities in both time and space. The study area lies in the south-eastern Czech Republic and western Slovakia. The spatio-temporal model of behavioural categories was calculated with the help of Monte Carlo simulations and statistical testing. One of the main advant...

Forests cover approximately one third of Central Europe. Based on a century of research tradition in phytosociology, potential vegetation mapping and palynology, oak (Quercus sp.) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica) are considered to be the natural dominants at low and middle altitudes, respectively. By contrast, currently many coniferous forests...

The term ‘historical ecology’ has been used with various meanings since the first half of the 20th century. Studies labelled as historical ecology have been produced in at least four academic disciplines: history, ecology, geography and anthropology. Although all those involved seem to agree that historical ecology concerns the historical interconn...

In this project we recognize the preparation for warfare and its respective industries for gunpowdermaking as a societal driver for land use in the late 18th and early 19th century Habsburg Empire putting considerable economic pressure on ecosystems with possibly long-term negative impacts. We focus on agricultural and forest landscapes and their p...

Common uses and traditional management were once important elements of woodland management in Central Europe (Johann et al. 2011). Among them, we can list for example pasturing, haymaking, coppicing, pannage, bee-keeping and wild fruit collecting. At different times and for different reasons, by the second half of the twentieth century virtually al...

Humans have managed European landscapes, including woodlands, for millennia. Prior to the birth of modern forestry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there existed two basic management forms for lowland broadleaved woods: coppicing and wood pasture. While the existence and characteristics of these two basic management types are well-known,...

Forests in Europe have been shaped considerably by human activities during most of the Holocene. Changes in forest structure, distribution of tree species and forest biodiversity are partly driven by management history, and many current forest types result from former management. The interdisciplinary project "Long-term woodland dynamics in Central...

Coppicing was one of the most important forest management systems in Europe documented in prehistory as well as in the Middle Ages. However, coppicing was gradually abandoned by the mid-20(th) century, which has altered the ecosystem structure, diversity and function of coppice woods. Our aim was to disentangle factors shaping the historical growth...

Tree-ring data sources used in the development of boundary-line and absolute increase threshold (ITRDB = International Tree Ring Database). (DOCX)

The plant community structure of European lowland forests has changed dramatically in the twentieth century, leading to biodiversity decline at various spatial scales. However, due to methodological difficulties associated with simultaneous changes in species diversity and composition, ecological processes behind the changes are still poorly unders...

The issue of continuity in deciduous oakwood vegetation has been in the forefront of woodland ecological studies for many decades. The two basic questions that emerge from existing research are whether or not oakwoods can be characterized by long-term stability and what may be the driving forces of the observed stability or change. To answer these...

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The important role of humans in the development of current ecosystems was recognized decades ago; however, the integration of history and ecology in order to inform conservation has been difficult. We identified four issues that hinder historical ecological research and considered possible solutions. First, differences in concepts and methods betwe...

In recent decades, the interconnectedness of history and ecology has received increasing attention. Although necessarily interdisciplinary, efforts to study this interconnectedness had their roots either in the humanities and social sciences or in the natural sciences: scholars have tried either to understand more about nature with the help of hist...

In Western and Central Europe, many woods are clearly separated from the surrounding countryside by permanent physical boundaries. While such boundaries are now out of use, in the past they were widespread and important landscape features. This paper argues that many woodland boundaries originate from the Middle Ages and perhaps even more from the...

This paper presents how long-term socioeconomic processes influenced the management and structure of a lowland ancient wood in the south-eastern Czech Republic from the 14th century to the present. The analysis draws on a wide range of historical documents to establish that the size, management and structure of Děvín Wood was remarkably stable thro...

In Grazing Ecology and Forest History F.W.M. Vera published his hypothesis that Europe's primeval vegetation was not closed forest but a more open, park-like landscape maintained by the grazing of large herbivores. The palaeoecological evidence has been re-examined a number of times, however, Vera's research and conclusions about more recent period...

This paper investigates changes in woodland cover in the Carpathian Basin throughout the Holocene, using historical and natural scientific sources. The overall results show that by the Roman Period latest, the whole Basin was cultural landscape where practically all woods were delimited and used. The first written data about the amount of woodland...

1st ed. 150 výt.

Decades have now passed since the recognition of the existence of the "history of woodland." This term, as we understand it today, does not mean the history of what people said about woods, and not even the history of people who lived in woods. However, it is not only the history of trees, other plants, and animals, either. It is all these together...

In 2000, the Medieval Royal Seat and Forest at Visegrád was unsuccessful in acquiring the UNESCO World Heritage title. At the moment, a new nomination is being prepared. This paper addresses some of the problems and tasks connected to this issue. These include site selection, cultural vs. natural heritage, ownership, management and local perception...