Impacts of Temporal Changes in Land use/cover on the Remaining Historical Forests in a Rapidly Urbanizing area

Abstract Background: Remaining historical forests are crucial for maintaining biodiversity in urban areas. However, the integrity and stability of historical forests are affected by land use/cover change in various ways. A better understanding of these impacts can help guide targeted conservation. Methods: In this study, we estimated the loss of forestlands and levels of threats and analysed the importance of critical areas for historical forests in the built-up area of a rapidly urbanizing city—Guiyang, China. Results and Conclusions: The results showed that 1988.46 ha of historical forestlands was transformed into other land use/cover types. The number of patches smaller than 10 ha increased by 51% from 1976 to 2018. The lands of 36 historical forest patches were completely transformed into other land use/cover types during the past 42 years. The mean value of the threat index of all the historical forest patches increased by 33% compared to the baseline year. Core and bridge areas regarded as key nodes and links for the connectivity of forest networks decreased in area by 632.34 and 331.92 ha, respectively. Most of the critical areas with high importance values for connectivity were located in the central part of the city. They were severely threatened by the surrounding areas, having high threat index values. Based on these findings, we recommend that effective measures be implemented to control the further loss of historical forests and increase the connectivity and buffering capacity of the remaining forests by planting trees in some key locations.