Spatial Dataset of the Inventory of Terraced Landscapes in Črniče, Gojače, and Vrtovin, Vipava Valley, Slovenia

Terraced landscapes are important to many regions' cultural and environmental characteristics. Accurate and comprehensive documentation of these landscapes is challenging, especially when inventorying drystone walled terraced landscapes and abandoned agricultural terraces. Even inventory methods based on LIDAR and fieldwork do not capture all of the mapped information. To address this challenge, the study proposed the inclusion of additional data sources into the inventory process, specifically aerial photographs from drones and photographs taken with advanced GPS devices. Combining already-tested methods and other data sources enabled a more comprehensive and accurate inventory process. The improved methodology was tested in three cadastral municipalities of the Vipava Valley (Črniče, Gojače and Vrtovin), where the terraces have predominantly dry-stone risers with different heights. A large percentage of the terraced landscape in the selected cadastral municipalities is abandoned, so the terraced structures are overgrown by vegetation and forest; in Gojače, almost half of the terraced landscape is like this. In some places, the terraced landscape has become almost entirely unrecognizable. An improved inventory methodology can map both active and abandoned agricultural terraces.