Abstract ID: 3.10656 | Accepted as Talk | Talk/Oral | TBA | TBA

In the past, forests in Central Europe were used for more diverse purposes than they are today. Forest utilisation practices such as litter raking and lopping were widespread and practiced until the middle of the 20th century. Litter raking means the collection of forest litter with small iron rakes by farmers, who needed bedding for their animals. The mixture of excrements and litter was later used as fertiliser for the fields. Lopping is the chopping off of branches from living trees. Lopping of broadleaf trees was practised for animal feed, lopping of conifers for bedding material. In total, a lot of material and thus carbon and nutrients were transferred through these practices from the forest into the agricultural system.
In Tyrol, detailed inventories of the forests were carried out around 1840, containing various information about the forest condition and management. Timber stocks, annual timber increment and harvest quantities were recorded, but also the annual amounts of biomass removed through litter raking and lopping. The recordings are accompanied by corresponding maps, that enable a clear spatial allocation of this information.
In order to investigate the ecological consequences of litter raking, field experiments were carried out on two test sites in the montane and subalpine altitudinal zones in Tyrol. To enable a differentiated quantification of the carbon stocks, ground vegetation, ecto-organic layers and mineral soil were sampled on random distributed sampling points. Additionally, we conducted a onetime litter raking intervention on randomly distributed 1 m² plots. We determined the weight of the removed organic material in the field and took subsamples to analyse the carbon content using an elemental analyser.
Combining historical inventory data with results from the field experiments and laboratory analyses enables a quantification of the historical carbon fluxes from forest to agricultural ecosystems. This transfer of significant quantities of carbon and nutrients over centuries has strongly influenced both ecosystems for a long time with impacts persisting until today. These new data improve our understanding of the impacts of historical forest management in favour of agriculture on recent forest condition and provide background information for current sustainable forest management decisions.