Human Impact on the Landscape - Examples from Serbia and Macedonia

Abstract

As a result of very fast demographic, socio-economic and technological changes, the level of modification of the landscape is increased. It is of particular importance to determine the intensity of the dominant geomorphologic processes, as well as a level of its modification in relation to anthropogenic factor. The basic idea of this research is to define and specify landscape areas modified by human factor, or by other words the areas degraded by anthropogenic influence. It was clear that during the analyzing of the intensity of different processes (fluvial erosion, denudation) there were permanent difficulties regarding to reliable separation of the degraded areas in relation to dominant factor by which they were generated. This is understandable if we take into a consideration that all above mentioned factors are corresponding in interaction, modifying normal natural processes very often. The research areas were Serbia and Macedonia, two countries in the central part of the Balkan Peninsula. Despite of their relatively small area (88.361 km(2), and 25.713 km(2) respectively) and similar morphology, there are high human impacts on the geomorphologic processes in both countries. Such examples are excessive denudation and deposition, changing of the fluvial process; open mining, building of numerous infrastructure objects by cutting the slopes etc. The higher human impact influences, the stronger response of the geomorphologic processes. The methodology used in this research is comparison of field research and analysis of documentation with modern tools like GIS and satellite imagery. The latest were used for better determination and quantification of the corresponding humanised" geomorphologic processes. It is shown that the extent of geomorphologic processes (especially denudation and fluvial erosion) in Serbia and Macedonia is highly multiplied by human impact.