Landscape changes of current-EU from 1900 til now.
Gif from r/gifs, I can see surburbanisation in the UK in the 30s-50s, and NL reclaiming land, but everywhere else seems to be becoming less settled, with less farmland, and more forested. This goes against what I thought was happening (though the rainforest reports might be skewing these expectations of europe).
Is this gif/map to be trusted? If it is, is there a single pattern going on here, or it is many patterns, or is there no patten?
Another aspect to consider - especially in regard to Sweden - is the retention forestry model. In basic terms, instead of clearing every part of a forest during a harvest, some parts are preserved: single trees [dead and living], patches and strips. The goal behind that is to preserve the biodiversity of the area and to allow the ecosystem to still function. It also allows the forest to replenish itself over time.
A study from 2007 noted that the number of living trees in Swedish forests have returned to 1955 levels, after a fall in the 1970s and 1980s.
This type of forestry has been practiced large-scale by Sweden for over 25 years. It's reflected towards the end of the .gif above by the increase of the rate of green over Sweden.
The change towards the retention forestry model came about as concerns over environmental damage and climate change increased. Countries like Sweden are very aware of the effects of climate change, as increases in temperature can be pretty dramatically seen on their landscape [i.e. melting glaciers, loss of tundra].
Forests =/= Wilderness
99% of those forests you can see regrowing aren't truly wild. They are "farmed" just like any other crop (with varying intensity) for wood. Of course for that business to remain sustainable you have to replant the cut patches after every harvest, and this was indeed a 19th century innovation/paradigm shift, the result of which is visible in that graphic. It's important to note that at the start point (1910) almost no old-growth forest that wasn't cut sometime in the last 2000 years remained in that map, it was all second or third generation forest.
For Scandinavia at least, a significant portion of the regrowth in forests can be attributed to the shift away from using wood for heating to other fuels such as coal and natural gas.
I'm still trying to remember where I read this, so give me a little while hunting down the source
It has one simple reason - the shift from agrarian economy to industrial economy and later economy based on services. People don't need farmland anymore, because there is an abundance of food at low prices, which can also be imported from outside Europe. So the less productive patches of farmland were converted to other purposes - woodlands, parks, reservations etc.
I think that map may not depict exactly what you think it does, but without knowing the source I can't say for certain. It's titled 'Gross Land Change' which in the scientific speak you'd find among environmental scientists and climatologists, means it would be depicting the change in land use and not depicting the actual land use. Hence giving the illusion that Europe has gotten exponentially greener than it actually has. Though that's not to say Europe hasn't gotten greener as it absolutely has.
As to why, there are several factors. Europe has been subjected to heavy deforestation for millennia as people cleared land for new settlements, to expand existing ones, or for building or heating. The late 1800s also saw massive deforestation to fuel the industrial revolution, so the start of your gif is close to the minimum forested extent of Europe.
I don't see any decrease in settlement from that series of maps and there certainly hasn't been much, nothing that would register on the scale of that map. To explain the decrease in farmland you need to look no further than farming techniques and yields that have improved drastically in the last few centuries, especially in the 20th century, meaning less cultivated land is needed to feed the population.
The 20th century saw conservation movements to preserve and expand existing forests and even plant new ones. Stringent environmental regulations mean what might have been a poisoned hillside downwind of a factory is today a thriving woodland. Similarly, what might have been land that was clear-cut by a lumber company in the 1890s was being selectively harvested and actively replanted. One of the few benefits of suburbanization is that it brings lots of trees to areas where there were previously few.
A final factor is globalization. Lots of furniture marketed in the first world, for just one example, will be made with lumber sourced from Brazil or Russia. Even food isn't exempt, 100 years ago you might have been eating Porridge grown down the street for breakfast, now you're eating Bananas from Central America and Oranges from Florida.
[Paraphrasing & Translating from a course I followed on deforestation at the KULeuven in 2013, can supply sources if needed]
Ever since the invention of agriculture 10.000 years ago, forests have disappeared in favour of crops. The increase in farmland (and consequently the decline of forests) sped up dramatically around the Industrial Revolution, in Europe from ~1700 until it stopped in ca. 1960, in North America it started around 1850 to 1970, in the developing countries this only started after WWII, and continues today.
From the start of the Industrial Revolution, there is a clear correlation between rising population and diminishing size of forests. In Europe, starting in 1850, the size of forests started to rise again, which seems strange because population size kept rising too. (In France, forest size doubled between 1850 and 2000, from 12,5% to 25%) There are four reasons for this strange trend shift:
I can elaborate if interested
To add to the other comments, I can tell you that in the middle of Germany, in hilly regions woodland is almost twice as much worth in revenues as farmland. The demand for quality hardwood is rising, and so do the prices. Hightech agriculture today only makes decent profit when you can put your huge GPS-steered tractors on really flat land.
Here's information about what the HILDA model is trying to accomplish. The modelers are trying to reconstruct historic land changes to see what effect it has on the carbon cycle.
Hopefully someone involved with determining the effects of carbon on climate change can offer more insight.
You should really post this in r/askscience. This is a scientific model that was constructed using historical data.
I wonder if it has something to do with changing naval construction methods as shipbuilders switched from making wooden ships to steel ones?
