One of the main problems affecting the forestry and agriculture sectors in Croatia is the mismatch between cadastral records and the actual situation on the ground. Combined with unresolved ownership issues and negative demographic trends, this creates negative effects, including forest wildfires, loss of biodiversity and landscape diversity, reduced income from forestry and agriculture, and further depopulation of rural areas. In Croatia, 600,000–700,000 hectares of agricultural land are overgrown with forests (Ministry of Agriculture, 2021, p. 92). This paper proposes the Forest Regulation Index (FRI), defined as the ratio between actual forest cover and forests included in the Forest Management Area of the Republic of Croatia. The index was calculated for regional and local self-government units using vector spatial data from Croatian Forests Ltd. together with high-resolution forest layers derived from publicly available Copernicus data. The resulting ratio can support agricultural and forestry development policies in a given area.
Konrad Kiš (Wed,) studied this question.