We regarded two different reference regions in Thuringia for our investigation:
- grasslands in the northern slope of the Thuringian Forest near Wechmar
- valley Schwarzatal in the western Thuringian Slate Mountains.
2. Small-range data capture with GPS
Through the extreme reduction of livestock in East Germany since 1990 there is no guarantee to a
complete use of all grassland areas any more. So the aim of this investigation is to observe
different landuse intensities in a limited catchment area for a long time period. We try to quantify
changes in frequency and extension of a variety of plants in grassland regions.
Our reference area is an around 4 ha large pasture parcel on moor land and located near
Paulinenaue (Brandenburg). This area is subdivided and submitted to different landuse regimes:
-no use
-vegetation cutting one or two times per year
-pasture with two species of sheep
One result of our first GPS-campaign is, that even in areas with no landuse we got a typical
composition and distribution of vegetation depending on elevation.
Some conclusions and open problems
GPS is a very useful system for digital data gathering in the countryside and for import into a
GIS. It should be preferred especially in that cases, where observation on the spot are needed
anyway. There are a range of several systems with different accuracies and costs. For
investigations with dynamic navigation tasks (e.g. exact positioning and finding again of
measuring points), online-GPS is needed. Simple receiver without any functionality of coordinate
correction are not suitable regarding accuracy and further processing within a GIS. One
advantage of using GPS is the easy use of the equipment and that no knowledge of survey
techniques is demanded. But a very good cooperation with the land surveying office is absolute
necessary.
One disadvantage was the manual attributing procedure, which was not software-supported
during the test period. Therefore this problem should be one task of automatizing GPS-use in the
future.
