How to quantify the phenomenon of spontaneous reforestation: an inventory of the inventories at the national level

Abstract

From their physical appearance as well as from the dynamic landscape and ecological viewpoints, the extensions of forests form an intermediate space between fallow land - in the broad sense - resulting from the abandoning of cultivated or grazing land and the forest proper. Like the moors and fallow lands, these extensions are hard to define and vary depending on the morphological, historical or socio-economic criteria used. This hard to define category of space is thus left out of the various inventories available concerning the use of land over the national territory, even though the latter clearly show, over time, the transfer of areas from cultivated land to forest. It is thus necessary to cross-check the data to form an idea of the phenomenon and its distribution in space over the national territory.