Mediterranean afforestation and the loss of mountain cultural landscapes: the case of Zagori

Despite summer wildfires and the expansion of urban and agricultural areas, Mediterranean mountains have experienced extensive afforestation during the last 70-years.

This has largely been a consequence of the abandonment of these areas and the loss of their traditional management strategies.

Afforestation processes not just imply an important heritage loss as cultural landscapes disappear under the forest without having been studied but they also boost wildfires, as traditional ways of managing the forests were not replaced by proactive forest monitoring.

UnderTheForest will study the cultural landscape under threat of afforestation and already afforested in the area of Zagori (Greece), identifying and dating its human and natural elements and linking them to specific historical and socioeconomical processes.

Despite being considered an area of exceptional natural heritage, Zagori’s cultural management has focused on its villages and their architectural elements, overlooking the landscape that sustained them.

UnderTheForest will provide important data for Zagori’s ongoing bid for the UNESCO World Heritage Site as a Cultural Landscape.

In order to do so, UnderTheForest will develop an innovative remote sensing workflow joining photogrammetric reconstruction for historical aerial imagery (1945 onwards), machine-learning probabilistic classification of multitemporal, multisource satellite imagery, and drone-based lidar survey (which will be able to locate structures under forest cover).

Together with more traditional archival research, pedestrian survey, trench excavation and radiocarbon dating, the project will identify and contextualise the cultural assets that made this landscape unique and provide new tools that can be applied to other areas currently under afforestation processes.