Landscape Development and Climate Change in Southwest Bulgaria (Pirin Mountains)

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

   PDF

2. Geoarchives – Why View the Past?

   • Karsten Grunewald, Jörg Scheithauer

   Pages 1-10

3. The Pirin Mountains as a Model Region

   • Karsten Grunewald, Jörg Scheithauer

   Pages 11-31

4. Holocene Climate and Landscape Chronology

   • Karsten Grunewald, Jörg Scheithauer

   Pages 33-60

5. Climate Data and Geo-Archives of the Recent Past

   • Karsten Grunewald, Jörg Scheithauer

   Pages 61-121

6. Specifics of the Regional Climate and Landscape History

   • Karsten Grunewald, Jörg Scheithauer

   Pages 123-135

7. Conclusion and Outlook

   • Karsten Grunewald, Jörg Scheithauer

   Pages 137-148

8. Back Matter

   Pages 149-161

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Landscape Development and Climate Change in Southwest Bulgaria aims to address some of the current limitations in our understanding of past Balkan climate and environment. High mountains and their ecosystems offer an outstanding opportunity for studies on the impact of climate change. The Balkan Mountains in Southeast Europe, situated at the transition between temperate and Mediterranean climate, are considered as very sensitive to historical and current global changes. The geoarchives lake sediment, peat and soil, long living trees and glaciers have been used to reconstruct the climatically-driven change of forest and treeline during the Holocene and the younger past. These processes are interrelated with complex ecological changes, as for example the seasonality of climate parameters. The landscape research approach with the analyses through multi-palaeo-geoecological proxies is new for the Balkans.

• Balkan paleoenvironment
• Climate analyses
• Dendroecology of Pinus heldreichii
• Glacieret
• Treeline
• climate change impacts

• Leibniz Institute of Ecological and Regi, Dresden, Germany

  Karsten Grunewald

• Landscape Research Centre, Dresden, Germany

  Jörg Scheithauer

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