Land-use legacies and forest change

The importance of land-use legacies for shaping contemporary landscape patterns and processes and for informing landscape management has been widely recognized for at least two decades (Bürgi et al. 2017; Foster et al. 2003), although research on the topic has accelerated dramatically in recent years. From a literature survey based on the WOS database and the search sentence ALL = (“land-use legac*” OR “land use legac*” AND forest*) we found 279 published papers for the period 1985–2020. Statistically speaking these papers reached an H-index of 40 and a total amount of citations of 6591. An increasing trend of published papers on this topic is not surprising (from 1 in 1994 to 30 per year between 2018 and 2020), yet the level of increasing interest from the scientific community has been remarkable, as demonstrated by the astonishing increase of citations per year (Fig. 1). Almost 16% of the selected papers were published by the journals Forest Ecology and Management, Landscape Ecology and Ecological Applications, but the variability of the disciplines involved highlights the strongly transdisciplinary character of this topic.