Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Landscapes far away from human infrastructure, herein "Far Away Landscapes" (FAL), hold specific ecological and socio-cultural values associated with natural and semi-natural conditions as well as with traditional rural cultures, yet in the anthropogenic world, they are rapidly disappearing or have already been lost. The purpose of this study is to map and assess FALs in Sweden, from the nemoral south to the boreal north, including subalpine and alpine regions, and evaluate the current anthropogenic pressures. FALs are defined as landscapes situated outside human infrastructure, applying three nested categories defined as >500m, >1000m, and >2000m distance from any infrastructure, as mapped by the National Land Cover (NMD) data of Sweden (layer “Artificial surface”). The results show a clear pattern, where the proportion of remote terrain drops sharply from 26.8% at >500m to just 6.8% at >2000m, explaining that infrastructure networks have efficiently occupied the majority of the landscape. A clear geographic divide was found where FALs are functionally extinct in southern and central Sweden, while over 97% of the nation’s remaining deep remoteness is concentrated in the northwestern interior based on the ≥ 2000m distance. Case study of Norrbotten East shows that FAL availability declines rapidly with increasing distance from artificial surface, with total remaining land cover decreasing from 33.1% of the region area at ≥500m to less than 1% at 2000m. In contrast, Norrbotten West retains substantially larger and more contiguous FALs, with 79.8% of the land remaining at ≥500m and over 51% still present at 2000m. The case study of Kalmar County stands out as a unique landscape reservoir in southern Sweden, consisting of the alvar heaths, maintaining a level of structural remoteness that is nearly extinct in its neighboring regions. The results show that the extensive infrastructural footprint of industrial forestry has severely fragmented the boreal forest matrix. As a result, the last remaining largescale remote areas are now mostly in alpine and sub-alpine terrain, not forests. These findings show that structural remoteness in Sweden is increasingly scarce and unevenly distributed.