**Conflict of interest**

*Advances in Forest Management under Global Change*

relief unit separately (**Figure 9**).

plains and hills (Subcarpathians).

being very useful in establishing patterns.

**5. Conclusion**

deforestation.

forests is manifested.

**Acknowledgements**

In the relief units where the forest fund is naturally fragmented and the access is much easier, we have forest exploitations on various locations (**Figure 8**).

It can be seen that the deforestation carried out within all the relief units varied from year to year. They are highlighted by the values of the annual FFI for each

**Figure 10** shows the average FFI for all 18 years of analysis. The most compact deforestation, on average, took place in the Mehedinți Plateau, in the Carpathian Mountains, and in the Danube Delta. Instead, they were more fragmented in the

Today, logging is one of the most important pressures on the natural environment, which causes major imbalances on all systemic components, the most important being the modification of microclimates [39, 40], floods, and landslides [41, 42]. In many specialized works, the need to develop methodologies for obtaining data on deforested surfaces and patterns in which they are made, especially for illegal cutting, is highlighted [43–46]. Fractal analysis offers a considerable amount of information, regarding the spatial characteristics of some fractal objects, whether or not they are in dynamics. The proposed index quantifies these characteristics,

Fractal analysis has proven to be a versatile method for evaluating the dynamics of deforestation, as well as identifying deforestation patterns; thus, it can be used complementary to the classical analyses by which data are obtained. FFI is useful in quantifying the degree of fragmentation and implicitly fractal compaction of forest areas and also provides important information on the effect of deforestation on forests, identifying also the moments of agglutination (clustering) of cumulative

Being a fractal index, the FFI analyses are invariant at scale, bringing a significant addition to the classical analyses, thus being relevant in the realization of strategies for forest management. The FFI was used in the analysis of deforestation in Romania and the effect of deforestation at the county level [19, 36], indicating in all cases that fragmentation of forests increases following deforestation, having negative consequences on the stability of the hydrographic network and on the habitats. Like any fractal analysis, FFI analysis has limitations. For a correct analysis, but also to be able to make comparisons, all images, which are analyzed, must be

In this study, FFI analysis allowed a clear differentiation of some patterns regarding the degree of fragmentation of the forests, but also of the compaction of the cumulative deforestation from the relief units in Romania, highlighting different dynamics. Thus, we have shown that the fragmentation of the forest is also relevant for the complex methodologies for calculating the flood risk and offers new perspectives for understanding the way in which the economic pressure on the

The research activities were financed by the projects "Spatial projection of the human pressure on forest ecosystems in Romania," University of Bucharest, (UB/1365), and "Development of the Theory of the Dynamic Context by

Analyzing the Role of the Aridization in Generating and Amplifying the Regressive

at the same resolution, scale, and position and equally binarized.

**134**

The authors declare no conflict of interest.
