Case Studies from the Dinaric Karst of Slovenia

Fig. 33: Island Kornat. Especially along the Adriatic coast, deforestation led to bare rocky country (photo: A. Mihevc).faces. Out of that, 24.6 ha are fields in the bottomsof 261 dolines. The rest of the surfaceswere used as pastures.At Račice village, 11.9 km² of theland is mostly covered by forest. There are1,395 dolines. While cleaning the land, thestones were piled into 23.2 km of dry walls.The volume of the removed stones is about5,815 m³, or 488 m³ per km 2 . On some Adriaticislands, quantity of removed stones is similar;at Krk island, more than 1,000 kg of stoneswere removed from one m 2 of the surface(Gams 1987). During long history of cleaningthe land, width and length of walls increasedtogether with fragmentation, while the area ofarable land decreased.Volčji Grad village is in the central part ofthe Kras plateau. It has 4.8 km² of land. Cleaningstarted in Bronze Age and by this meansthey gained 38.6 ha of fields. All of the dolineswere cultivated too, and there are 20 ha of cultivatedland in the 162 dolines.Even with such long and intensive land use,there was no more than about 10 cm of soilerosion on the slopes of dolines.One of the main parts of the Dinaric karst- the Kras, the islands and low plateaus of theDalmatian coast - present the types of land usetypical of Mediterranean countries. These landuse activities produce changes in the surface(Nicod 2003) like stone clearing, the buildingof dry walls and hill slope terraces and managementin the dolines, uvalas and poljes.From historical data, it is known (Kranjc2008) that a great part of the Dinaric karstwas deforested and that the landscape transformedinto a bare rocky country, a real stonedesert. Human deforestation began during theNeolithic period (6,500-6,000 BC). There wereseveral reasons for deforestation, mostly requirementsof new land for pasture and timberuse.The Dinaric karst became more and morebarren and a great part of it became synonym45