The Eye of the Beholder: Applying Visual Analysis in an Historical Study of Lynxes’ Representations in the Bavarian Forest Region

Representation is never neutral, especially when it comes to agents devoid of their own voice. As such, wildlife has often been employed as a sort of leverage point, an emotional trigger aimed to deliver a certain message (see e.g., Cronin, 2011). The establishment of the Bavarian Forest National Park (BFNP) coincided with the return of large carnivores to the region, in particular, lynxes. Lynxes are endemic to the area; however, as in many other parts of Europe, the last free-roaming individuals were eradicated in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the past few decades, slowly, lynxes were both reintroduced or came back on their own volition, and that has created a considerable response from the population. There has been extensive coverage of the return of these animals both in local and regional media. Lynxes are also kept in the enclosures of the BFNP to afford visitors an unmediated look at the native charismatic megafauna. In this chapter, I analyse how lynxes have been represented in the local media, the newspaper Grafenauer Anzeiger, and discuss merits and drawbacks of visual analysis research method in understanding the change in attitudes towards these animals’ presence in the BFNP area. For that, I look at the archival and contemporary publications of the newspaper. It has been said that the precondition for people’s understanding of reality lays in fantasy, in imagining things to be true (Bergman, 2013). A visual analysis method can help uncover stories that do not necessarily come to the fore in text, and that, in turn, makes it possible to have a fuller grasp of one’s research object. Andrew Isenberg once said that “[our] representations of wildlife are inescapably expressions of human values” (Isenberg, 2002), and while texts are important in their own regard, visual analysis gives an opportunity to look behind a textual narrative to discern whether what we see of the wildlife corresponds to what we understand.

Tourism management in national parks: Šumava and Bayerischer Wald (Bavarian Forest) in the Czech-German borderland

Along the Czech-German border there are four national parks, two Czech and two German, arranged in cross-border ‘pairs’. This article focuses on the southern ‘pair’ formed by the parks of Šumava and Bayerischer Wald (Bavarian Forest). The aim is to evaluate and compare tourism organization in their areas, taking into account selected aspects of management: the network of hiking trails with its related infrastructure, transport accessibility, a typology of tourist centers, as well as directions and destinations of tourist movements. Based on the results, it can be concluded that the availability of geographical space for tourists is much greater in the German than in the Czech national park, and the tourism infrastructure is clearly more extensive there, including the network of tourist trails. This is mainly due to the longer and fairly uninterrupted development of tourism in this area. Šumava National Park can be identified as a model in terms of how to adjust the directions of tourist movements and the layout of the tourist trail network to the needs of natural environment. On the basis of observations in both national parks, it is possible to indicate various solutions that, after appropriate adaptation, may bring benefits to other protected areas.

Impacts of mountain forest dieback on aquatic insect communities: A DNA metabarcoding analysis of samples from the Bavarian Forest

Mountain forests are increasingly affected by changes in rainfall and pest outbreaks, and the way forests are managed can have direct consequences for the streams flowing through forests. Aquatic macroinvertebrate communities are great bioindicators and changes to their ecosystem likely translates to changes in their overall composition and abundance. The Bavarian Forest National Park (SE Germany) is dominated by the Norway spruce (Picea abies) which, weakened by storms and other stressors, is susceptible to infestation by the European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus). The result is large scale forest dieback in some areas, and forest management practices that lead to a predominance of three different forest types (hereafter habitats): Intact forest that is healthy and not impacted by Ips typographus; Disturbed forest that was impacted by Ips typographus, left to regenerate naturally, and from which deadwood was not removed; and Salvaged forest that was heavily impacted by Ips typographus with the same consequences, but from which deadwood was removed, creating a treeless forest meadow. Intact forest that is healthy and not impacted by Ips typographus; Disturbed forest that was impacted by Ips typographus, left to regenerate naturally, and from which deadwood was not removed; and Salvaged forest that was heavily impacted by Ips typographus with the same consequences, but from which deadwood was removed, creating a treeless forest meadow. To analyze the impacts these different forest management strategies have on the aquatic insect communities, 30 samples from 11 different streams were taken using kick-sampling. Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified by bulk metabarcoding of dried, ground samples. A mock community was used to verify the setup and a DNA spike-in with three foreign OTUs was added to each sample to measure the biases introduced by PCR amplification and sequencing. Biases varied across samples, but spike-in OTUs produced a pattern indicating predictable biases which could lead to quantifiable metabarcoding results in the future. In total, 260 macroinvertebrate OTUs were identified. In comparison, a morphological study by Bojková et al. (2018) in the same region with twice the number of sampling sites collected 194 taxa in the same month as our samples. This underlines the potential for metabarcoding in evaluating species richness. Species richness was high across all habitats. A significant difference between the forest conditions was detected: The number of detected Diptera OTUs was lowest in disturbed habitats (55) and highest in salvaged areas (73). A permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) indicated that habitat (i.e., intact, disturbed, salvaged) had an effect on the observed OTU distribution (9.2%), but that the stream catchment had a much larger effect (39.3%) regardless of the habitat. Our findings indicate that forest management can affect stream macroinvertebrate communities, and that this was most pronounced for the Diptera, a group for which DNA metabarcoding is particularly well suited because of their small size and high diversity.

Investigation of runoff generation and Radon-222 activities in a forested catchment using HydroGeoSphere

<p>Radon (<sup>222</sup>Rn) is widely used as a natural tracer to investigate surface/groundwater interactions for hydrological systems. Because <sup>222</sup>Rn activities in groundwater are higher compared to surface water, it can be used to quantify groundwater inflow rates into rivers and streams. Here we present a process-based model to simulate <sup>222</sup>Rn emanation and transport in groundwater to investigate surface/groundwater interactions for the  Große Ohe catchment, located in the Bavarian Forest National Park (Germany). For representing surface and groundwater flow in the catchment as well as transport, decay, and emanation of <sup>222</sup>Rn, the processed based hydrological model HydroGeosphere (HGS) is used. HGS is an integrated surface sub-surface hydrological model (ISSHM) which can simulate reactive transport in surface and sub-surface flow. The model was calibrated using measured in-stream<sup> 222</sup>Rn activities and continuous discharge observations. Main objective of this study is to investigate runoff generation in the catchment and how hydrological processes are affecting the age and residence time composition of groundwater.  </p>

Holocene spatio-temporal patterns of biomass burning in the Bohemian-Bavarian Forest Mountains (Central Europe)

<p>Long-term perspectives on disturbance dynamics are important for the conservation of protected areas, yet restoration and conservation strategies in the Bohemian-Bavarian Forest Mountains do not consider the long-term role and patterns of forest fire, which is still deemed a negligible ecosystem disturbance in Central Europe. The scarcity of macroscopic charcoal studies in this area has likely hampered a complete understanding of local fire regime dynamics and its legacies in the present forest structure and composition. Here we used macroscopic charcoal (number, area and morphology of charred particles) and pollen analysis to investigate high resolution spatial and temporal patterns in Holocene fire regimes in the Bavarian-Bohemian Forest. We explored the relationship between changing forest composition dynamics and the influence topography had on spatial patterns of biomass burning. For this, we selected three lacustrine sites (two new, one published), located along a 30 km longitudinal transect within the studied area, at similar elevations in the mixed forest belt, with opposite (north vs. south) aspects. Results showed similar changes in biomass burning, fire frequency and peak magnitude at all sites, with a maximum during the early Holocene when fire resistant taxa (<em>Pinus</em> and <em>Betula</em>) dominated. Fire frequency decreased by half with the expansion of more fire-sensitive taxa (e.g., <em>Picea</em> and <em>Fagus</em>) during the mid-Holocene and reached a second maximum in the late Holocene, parallel with sustained increases in anthropogenic pollen indicators. We found a close north-south correspondence in the succession of fire patterns, i.e., fine-scale changes in biomass burning in the Bavarian Forest site (south-facing catchment) occurred around the same time with those observed at the Bohemian Forest sites (predominantly north-facing catchments), and these changes mirrored the Holocene dynamics of the main forest taxa. For example, the lowest biomass burning and peak magnitude intervals marked the beginning of <em>Picea abies</em> expansion at ~ 9 ka BP, <em>Fagus sylvatica</em> expansion at ~6 ka and <em>Abies alba</em> expansion at ~5 ka BP. Furthermore, we found a direct relationship between the abundance of charred morphotypes of conifer needles and deciduous leaves and the dominance of pine and birch in our pollen records, and a close correspondence between the abundance of non-woody charcoal morphotypes and pollen-derived landscape openness. Non-woody charcoal morphotypes dominated the charcoal records in the Early Holocene at the peak of biomass burning, whereas the abundance of woody morphotypes peaked around 6-8 ka BP and over the last millennium and their proportion in total charcoal influx increased starting 4 ka BP. Our study enables a better understanding of past and present fire regimes in the Bavarian-Bohemian Forest Mountains and highlights the need to consider the effects of fire as part of climate-change forest conservation strategies.</p>

High-resolution DOC measurements indicate differences in DOC mobilization processes depending on topography

<p>Since the 1980s, an increase in dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in waters of the Northern hemisphere has been observed. However, no general explanation has been found so far. Our study focuses on investigating the mechanisms influencing DOC mobilization and export in the streams of a forested headwater catchment in the Bavarian Forest National Park, Germany, as controlled by topography and hydrological conditions. Our goal is to identify differences in DOC mobilization processes between steep hillslopes and riparian zones and between different precipitation events. We hypothesize that different hydrological conditions and the topographical position (steep hillslopes vs. riparian zones) influence sources of DOC and mobilization processes. </p><p>Three continuous sampling sites were established in different topographical positions within the catchment of the Große Ohe in the Bavarian Forest National Park along one of the streams: at a steep hillslope (880 m.a.s.l.), in a transition zone where the steep hillsides level off (805 m.a.s.l.) and in a flat and wide riparian zone (770 m.a.s.l). At these three locations, DOC concentrations in stream water have been measured continuously using UV-Vis spectrometry since early summer 2018, in combination with continuous discharge measurements. In addition, we regularly conducted a longitudinal sampling in order to analyze stream water chemistry parameters at 16 sampling points along the investigated stretch of about 3 km.</p><p>We analyzed discharge and DOC dynamics and DOC-Q hysteresis patterns, derived from the high-resolution data, to investigate if DOC mobilization differed between the topographical positions. We focus on two large events with different antecedent hydrological conditions in October 2018 (P<sub>tot</sub>: 30 mm, API<sub>14</sub>: 1.9 mm) and May 2019 (P<sub>tot</sub>: 28.9 mm, API<sub>14</sub>: 46.8 mm). At all topographical positions, maximal DOC concentrations were higher during the event in October 2018 (up to 15 mg/l) than during the event in May 2019 (up to 10 mg/l). These maximal concentrations also persisted much longer on the falling limb of the hydrograph during the October event, following dry conditions, than during the May event, following wet conditions.  This behavior results in wider hysteresis loops at all topographical positions during the event in October 2018 than in May 2019. However, peak concentrations dropped more quickly at the site of the steep hillslope than at the site of the transition zone and the riparian zone, resulting in more compressed hysteresis loops during both events. We use these differences in the DOC-Q hysteresis patterns to identify key processes for DOC mobilization and to create a perceptual model for DOC export from small, forested catchments.</p>

Large-Scale Mapping of Tree Species and Dead Trees in Šumava National Park and Bavarian Forest National Park Using Lidar and Multispectral Imagery

Knowledge of forest structures—and of dead wood in particular—is fundamental to understanding, managing, and preserving the biodiversity of our forests. Lidar is a valuable technology for the area-wide mapping of trees in 3D because of its capability to penetrate vegetation. In essence, this technique enables the detection of single trees and their properties in all forest layers. This paper highlights a successful mapping of tree species—subdivided into conifers and broadleaf trees—and standing dead wood in a large forest 924 km2 in size. As a novelty, we calibrate the critical stopping criterion of the tree segmentation based on a normalized cut with regard to coniferous and broadleaf trees. The experiments were conducted in Šumava National Park and Bavarian Forest National Park. For both parks, lidar data were acquired at a point density of 55 points/m2. Aerial multispectral imagery was captured for Šumava National Park at a ground sample distance (GSD) of 17 cm and for Bavarian Forest National Park at 9.5 cm GSD. Classification of the two tree groups and standing dead wood—located in areas of pest infestation—is based on a diverse set of features (geometric, intensity-based, 3D shape contexts, multispectral-based) and well-known classifiers (Random forest and logistic regression). We show that the effect of under- and oversegmentation can be reduced by the modified normalized cut segmentation, thereby improving the precision by 13%. Conifers, broadleaf trees, and standing dead trees are classified with overall accuracies better than 90%. All in all, this experiment demonstrates the feasibility of large-scale and high-accuracy mapping of single conifers, broadleaf trees, and standing dead trees using lidar and aerial imagery.