Deforestation has been recognized as an important environmental threat in the hilly area of Eastern Romania during the last two
centuries. Nowadays, these former forested lands are extremely degraded through soil erosion and gullying due to improper
human impact. Under such background, the paper aims at reconstituting the natural forest cover of the late 18th century, prior the
aggressive deforesting actions. The methodology is based on two key elements: old maps and soil typology, both integrated into a
GIS database. As results, the old maps allow a rough estimation of forest extent in the late 18th century (at least 65% of the
region, comparing to 20.7% at present) but the calculated cartographical errors provide an imprecise spatial image. Therefore,
through its different remanent properties because of the inertia to land cover changes, the soil comes to complete the survey.
Since there is a good correspondence between the ecological conditions of forest development and the pedogenetical conditions
of luvic soils formation, we argued that before the late 18th century the lands under forestry occupied at least 70% within the
study case. The complementarity of the criteria, based on totally different elements, provides the confidence and the validity of
the results for this timeframe and spatial scale of analysis. Thus, this study offers highly promising potential to reconstruct the
past spatial of forest in regions where there are no other useful documents in order to substantiate the management plans for
durable environmental development according to the natural ecological pattern.