Temporal landscape changes (1963-1998) at the region of “Kopatsari” in the Prefecture of Grevena

The villages of “Kopatsari” in the Prefecture of Grevena compose a distinctive traditional mountainous Greek landscape, which tends to degrade due to socioeconomic changes of the last decades. The aim of this paper was to study the temporal changes in that landscape through the geographic survey with the use of Geographic Information Systems (G.I.S.) in combination with socioeconomic factors. The region of six villages of “Kopatsari” was chosen as the study area, which extends at the east side of Pindos Mountain in the Prefecture of Grevena. The landscape of the study area has been evolving under the long and lasting influences of the residents’ activities, forming a varied mosaic with special natural and cultural characteristics. The landscape structure and the land cover/use changes during the 1963-1998 period were mapped through the ArcGIS program. The spatial data that resulted combined with demographic and socioeconomic changes that took place in the region show that the abandonment along with the modernization of traditional practices in agriculture, animal husbandry and forestry, and the turn of the residents’ interest to other activities led to an increase of the vegetation density. However the landscape diversity is conserved to a significant extent. The grassland area was decreased by 49.42% between 1963 and 1998 along with the reduction by 41.51% of the cover of sparser forest lands, while denser forest lands recorded an outstanding increase by 531.61%, confirming the landscape tendency to become denser. The comparative estimation of eight landscape indices (number and mean patch size, edge density, mean shape index, mean patch fractal dimension, interspersion juxtaposition index and Shannon’s diversity and evenness indexes) at the landscape level in 1998 showed that the study area’s landscape still conserved its diversity compared to 1963.