Evaluation of land cover/ land use development in selected landscape conservation areas in comparison to non-protected areas

Abstract

Qualities of protected areas in Europe are the result of mutual collaboration, and the influence of natural conditions and historical development. Therefore, landscape protection has a wider scope. In addition to the protection of the landscape’s natural qualities, landscape protection also needs to identify human-driven impacts that support or directly affect landscape qualities. We have compared the development of land use/ land cover in selected landscape conservation areas, and suitably selected referential areas in four time levels within a period of more than 150 years. The goals were to identify the types of land use that decrease, or increase the qualities of landscape, and to verify the hypothesis that landscape conservation areas, protected areas, have gone through a different land use/ land cover development than the referential areas. The results of this comparison do not confirm our hypothesis. The most substantial changes in the rural areas in Czechia took place in a distant past not covered by the dataset used in this study.