Morphometry and Land Use on the Mountains in Republic of Macedonia - Sustainable Development in Mountain Regions: Southeastern Europe - page 64

they are unequally outspreaded; most of them are located in the west and central
part of the country, while only two, Osogovo (2,252 m) and Belasica (2,029 m),
are in the eastern part. Because of variable genesis and geomorphic evolution, high
mountains have significant morphometric differences, clearly evident in its hypsom-
etry, slopes, aspects, curvatures, etc. (Milevski, 2009 ). Although these are important
for the physical-geographic processes, mountain morphometry highly influenced
human activities as well. According to Markoski ( 1995 ), in 1961 the area of high
mountains was populated with 136,217 inhabitants, while in 1981 with 124,250
inhabitants of which 37,760 settled above 1,000 m of altitude (about 30,000 by latest
estimation for 2002). The spatial distribution of this population and its activities in
the mountain areas are closely related with the topography. On the other side, topog-
raphy with terrain morphometry largely determinates land-use structure, which is
analysed in this work by the Corine Land Cover 2000 (CLC2000) data. CLC2000
is used as a very representative and standardised source of data for the Republic
of Macedonia (prepared between 1998 and 2000 as a part of the project of EEA
European Environment Agency), although there are other possibilities for remote
sensing based land-use detection sources like Landsat ETM+, ASTER (Milevski,
2005b ). Thirty-one land-use classes have been identified and mapped in the coun-
try, with unit resolution of 20 ha. Joint analyses of morphometry and land use in
this work show considerable differences of land-use distribution by hypsometry,
slopes and aspects, which are very significant for further sustainable development
of mountain areas ( Fig. 6.1 ).
Fig. 6.1 Geographic locations of high mountains in the Republic of Macedonia
6.2 Methodology
Two basic analyses were made, for the purpose of this chapter: one of mountain mor-
phometry and other of mountain area land use. First, high mountains are precisely
bounded according to the cartographic (Markoski, 1995 , 2004 ) and morphologic
approaches. However, there are problematic areas where mountains gradually pass