Landscape changes in Czech large protected areas 1950–2020: Two different landscapes types on the same path

Abstract

Landscape and its development is crucial for viability and management of protected areas, therefore, we focused on Czech large protected areas and analysed their land cover and landscape structure changes from the 1950s to recent times. Based on four milestones (1950, 1990, 2004 and 2020), data from topographic maps and aerial imagery were vectorized and use for following steps as analysing main trends of changes: an increase in forest in all areas and extensification of agriculture; the latter was expressed by permanent grassland growth in almost all areas and by arable land decrease. Urbanisation was reflected in the growth of built-up areas. However, these changes did not take place equally across all protected areas. Therefore, we distinguished two groups: 1) more stable (in terms of land cover change) and forested areas; 2) protected landscape areas which were also established for conservation of cultural landscape with open land cover categories, which showed larger changes. Moreover, landscape structure shows its simplification during the study period across almost all protected areas. Therefore, our results indicate that, in some protected areas, landscape stability and in some others landscape diversity are their values.