Contribution to knowledge of spatial distribution of succession trees in relationship with distance of forest border

Land use reflects the needs, demands and values of human society. We can see two antagonistic trends of land use change in Slovakia over the past few decades. Land use change towards more intensive in some areas (vicinity of cities, highways, lowlands), but others (uplands and mountains with traditionally agricultural used) are abandoned and left to their own spontaneous dynamic. The abandonment of agriculture is a pattern common to all industrialized countries, especially in hilly and mountain ranges (Farina, A., 2007). In this paper, we focused on evaluation of agricultural land use abandoning at two sample grasslands – vicinity to Tuhár and Hronec villages. We recorded position of succession trees by GPS at sample grasslands and determined theirʼs type and age. We used ArcGIS 10 and STATISTICA 10 software for our analysis. Results validate significant relation between spatial distribution of succession overgrowth and distance from forest border