Spontaneous landscape dynamics in the Pays de Bitche, Lorraine (France), during the Little Ice Age

ABSTRACT

This study is an analysis of a historical document (the ‘Atlas topographique du comté de Bitche’), dating from 1758 and carried out in north-eastern France. The Atlas is composed of three large volumes. The aim was to evaluate the timber resources that had accumulated during the 100 years of land abandonment following the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). Before the seventeenth century, the main woodland management was a form of the selective cutting of over-mature trees.

The authors of the Atlas focused on oak (without differentiating Quercus petraea from Q. robur) and beech (Fagus sylvatica) sexual regeneration, dead wood and the characteristics of woodlands. According to size, the woodlands (so-called ‘futaies’) were divided into five categories to which the authors associated arbitrary age ranges. Other information concerned climatic events (storms, frosts and drought), large illegal cuttings and new rules for land use.

These descriptions were converted into semi-quantitative data by counting the number of mentions of the woodland categories. The main result was that futaies with large-sized trees, specifically oaks, were dominant. Tree-ring counting on twenty-four selected beech and oak trees indicate that there was no relationship between age and size. Another interesting result was that during the 100 years of non-use, oaks died massively probably following competition with beech, harsh climatic events typical of the Little Ice Age or insect attacks.

Keywords:

• Beech-oak forest
• competition
• depopulation
• land abandonment
• Little Ice Age

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research work on which this paper is based was supported by the DRIIHM LabEx (Device for Interdisciplinary Research on Human-Environments Interactions) — CNRS-INEE

I am grateful to Hubert Schmuck (ONF Bitche), Edward de Turckheim (private owner), Emil Eitel from Eguelsharth, the mayoral team from Bining, and the foresters from ONF of Saverne for allowing access to their forests and permission to core the beech and oak; to Patrick Behr (Inra of Champenoux, director Jean-Luc Dupouey) for the analysis of the tree cores; to Fabrice Bonne (Inra of Champenoux), Loïc Duchamp, Jean-Claude Génot and Christophe Fabing (Parc Naturel Régional des Vosges du Nord), and Vincent Robin (University of Lorraine) for coring these trees. Many thanks also to Patricia Balcar (Naturpark Pfälzerwald) for the availability of unpublished dendrochronological data. I thank the editor Della Hooke for her help and also Catherine Stott for the English correction, and the reviewer Rob Jarman for helpful comments on the article.