The flora of the Flemish coastal dunes (Belgium) in a changing landscape

Abstract

As in many European countries, the Belgian coastal zone has been subject to quite drastic changes during the past centuries. These changes have taken a number of forms. Suburbanization associated with tourist development is considered the major cause of nature degradation; in fact almost half of the dune area, which originally covered a surface of approximately 7.6km<sup>2</sup>, has disappeared at the expense of buildings, gardens and roads. Within the remaining dune sites, the natural landscape has changed as a result of different, often interacting, factors such as changes in agricultural land use and recreation. To investigate the influence of several 'natural' and anthropogenic processes on floristic distribution, digitized maps are compared using a GIS. Data can be extracted and put in a database by overlaying the maps with the km<sup>2</sup> grid used for floristic inventories.