Forest Environmental History Berchtesgaden – FORESTED

The project explores the environmental history of forests in the area of the present-day national park Berchtesgaden, building on the historical sources kept in the local forest archive. It pursues two main thematic foci: The first explores how forest use (management, forest grazing, hunting) evolved in Berchtesgaden since the late 18th century. It further investigates the effects of these management changes on forest C dynamics. Important sources include visitation protocols, forest maps, forest cutting plans and overviews, and descriptions of servitute rights. Using methods such as C accounting and modelling, C stocks and fluxes in forest ecosystems will be reconstructed and analysed over long time periods and in a spatially explicit way. The second research focus inquires how historical interventions (or their cessation) affect present-day biodiversity in the forests of Berchtesgaden. To this end, the data compiled in the first thematic focus will be complemented by further spatially explicit data and recent datasets on biodiversity and spatially analysed. The topics will be further developed in an environmental history dissertation project and specified depending on source availability, and in case of need, additional sources will be consulted beyond those of the Forest Archive in Berchtesgaden.