Horizon Europe UnderTheForest Project: Mediterranean afforestation and loss of mountain cultural landscapes: the case of Zagori
- Type Project
- Status Firmado
- Execution 2025 -2026
- Assigned Budget 165.312,96 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing Horizonte Europa 2021-2027
- Project website Proyecto UnderTheForest
Over the past 70 years, Mediterranean mountains have suffered extensive afforestation due to the abandonment of traditional land management practices. This has led to the disappearance of cultural landscapes, buried beneath unstudied forests. The lack of proactive forest monitoring has also increased the risk of wildfires. As these landscapes disappear, a valuable heritage is lost, leaving a gap in our understanding of historical land use.
With support from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions program, the UnderTheForest project seeks to address this issue in Zagori, Greece. By identifying human and natural elements within the landscape, the project connects these features to specific historical and socioeconomic processes. Using advanced remote sensing and traditional archaeological methods, UnderTheForest seeks to support Zagori's nomination for UNESCO World Heritage status.
UnderTheForest is developing an innovative remote sensing workflow that combines photogrammetric reconstruction from historical aerial imagery (back to 1945), probabilistic machine learning classification of multi-temporal, multi-source satellite imagery, and drone-based lidar surveying (which will locate structures beneath the forest canopy). Along with more traditional archival research—foot survey, trenching, and radiocarbon dating—the project will identify and contextualize the cultural assets that made this landscape unique and provide new tools applicable to other areas currently undergoing forestation.
Despite summer forest fires and the expansion of urban and agricultural areas, Mediterranean mountains have experienced extensive afforestation over the past 70 years. This has largely been a consequence of the abandonment of these areas and the loss of traditional management strategies. Afforestation processes not only entail a significant loss of heritage, as cultural landscapes disappear beneath the forest without being studied, but also encourage wildfires, as traditional methods of forest management have not been replaced by proactive forest monitoring.
UnderTheForest will study the threatened and already afforested cultural landscape in the Zagori area of Greece, identifying and dating its human and natural elements and relating them to specific historical and socioeconomic processes. Despite being considered an outstanding natural heritage area, Zagori's cultural management has focused on its villages and architectural elements, with a view to the landscape that supported them. UnderTheForest will provide important data for Zagori's ongoing candidacy for UNESCO World Heritage status as a Cultural Landscape. To this end, UnderTheForest will develop an innovative remote sensing workflow that unites photogrammetric reconstruction of historical aerial imagery (from 1945 onward), machine learning probabilistic classification of multi-temporal, multi-source satellite imagery, and drone-based lidar surveying (which will be able to locate structures beneath the forest canopy).
Along with more traditional archival research, pedestrian surveys, trench excavation, and radiocarbon dating, the project will identify and contextualize the cultural assets that made this landscape unique and provide new tools that can be applied to other areas currently undergoing forestation.
- BARCELONA SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER CENTRO NACIONAL DE SUPERCOMPUTACION (BSC CNS)
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