Forest cover changes in the Ravni Kotari Region in the second half of the 19th century

Sa？etak The focus of this paper is forest cover change during the second half of the 19th century in the Ravni Kotari Region. The starting point for the research was data on forests and wooded pastures from 1849, based on Ravni Kotari cadastral municipalities of the first systematic Franciscan Survey and data on forest cover from the 1900 cadastre revision. GIS ArcMap software was used to visualise the forest cover and perform spatial pattern analysis using Moran’s I and Getis-Ord Gi* statistics. The results indicated a small proportion of forests in Ravni Kotari cadastral municipalities and Ravni Kotari as a whole in 1849, but an increase in forest cover throughout the second half of the 19th century. Forest cover increase was a consequence of several legislative and institutional protection measures for forests, which came into effect in Dalmatia in the second half of the 19th century. Statistically significant positive and negative spatial autocorrelations of forest cover were present in some adjacent municipalities, indicating the mainly random influence of certain factors on forest changes in the Ravni Kotari Region