THE DYNAMICS OF FOREST COVER IN THE LANDS OF THE PERM URBAN AGGLOMERATION (A CASE STUDY OF THE BABKINSKO-YUGOVSKOY LANDSCAPE)

Abstract

In the forest zone of the European part of Russia, among the processes actively developing within most urban agglomerations, of particular importance is the process of afforestation, i.e. an increase in the area of territories with forest vegetation due to the reduction of other types of land. The Perm urban agglomeration is no exception. The replacement of part of agricultural land with forest geosystems has become a widespread process here in recent decades, as in the entire Perm region. The paper attempts to establish the scale, pace and main causes of afforestation within the agglomeration, which is done based on the example of the Babkinsko-Yugovskoy landscape, occupying the biggest part of the agglomeration. Earth remote sensing data (Landsat open satellite data) provide a large spatial and multi-temporal coverage for analyzing the landscape and obtaining qualitative data on changes in vegetation cover over several decades. Increase in the areas of restorative successions, which started in the 1990s, reached the highest values in the period from 2010 to 2020 (6,48%). This process mainly affected agricultural lands. The main natural factors of land differentiation in terms of the scale and rate of withdrawal from agricultural use are the small contours of a large part of agricultural land and difference in soil fertility.