Mateusz Troll

The paper discusses chosen results of the third part of long-time, interdisciplinary studies on Hutsul summer farming in the Chornohora mountains, published in a book titled Pasterstwo w Czarnohorze (the English title: Shepherding in the Chornohora). Janusz Gudowski (the book’s editor) claims that the representativeness of the research carried out by his team in a small part of the Chornohora (Mt Kukul), is high, which is a matter of discussion here. The paper’s author argues with the applied research approach, which does not take into consideration a possible variation of economic relations in different grazing seasons and its influence on summer farming change. Examples of changes investigated during this research, and caused by such a variation, are discussed in the paper as a separate category of interdisciplinary study results, which cannot be extrapolated outside the study area. Treating such results as representative could give a false view of summer farming changes. Above all, the study area used in this interdisciplinary research cannot be recognized in author’s opinion as representative, when only relatively small secondary grasslands were investigated, resulting, among others, in overrepresentation of cattle farms as well as a lack of secondary succession symptoms. Among the most important features of the Chornohora summer livestock farming, not represented in the study area, and not described in this book, are sheep grazing in general (despite the English title of this book, only cattle grazing was investigated during this research) and communal grazing, both sheep and cattle. A different view on the role of long-time pasture ownership changes (1999–2014) and relations between the nature protection and summer farming in the Chornohora (two protected areas with different protection zones) is also presented in this paper.

Previous studies concerning forest cover changes in the Polish Carpathians did not formerly extend further than the mid-19 th century, because of the lack of detailed cartographic materials. Earlier forest changes, especially their magnitude but sometimes even their direction ( deforestation, stabilisation or afforestation ) are poorly investigated. This paper shows how to extend a temporal sequence of forest cover data for Zawoja village in the Polish Carpathians using non-cartographic data from the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries. We used non-cartographic data from the first Austrian cadastral system, the so-called Josephinian cadastre, carried out in the 1780s, and its revision done in 1819 – 1820. These data were compared with the stable cadastre and its two revisions ( 1844 – 1898 ) and mostly later cartographic materials ( 1861 – 2014 ). Thematic coherence of cadastral and cartographic data, conformity of Zawoja village boundaries in the analysed period, as well as errors of the earliest cadastral measurements were investigated. The data acquired in the 1780s and 1819 – 1820 enabled the estimation of the productive and non-productive forest area as well as the area of pastures and meadows partly covered with forest. Though possible measurement errors could add up to 7 % of the total village area, the data clearly document the end of the deforestation phase ongoing in Zawoja until the first half of the 19 th century, and later relative stabilisation of forest cover during the second half of that century. Data from the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries indicate a change trend opposite to the later, frequently described stabilisation of forest cover and progressive afforestation. Using the unpublished data extracted from cartographic materials, we also show this latter part of long term forest cover changes, thereby presenting an example of forest transition in the Polish Carpathians.