Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Present Changes in European Rural Landscapes
Zdenek Lipský
2.1 Topical Issue of Landscape Changes
Landscape changes represent an extremely wide as well as very important and top-
ical issue in landscape sciences. The number of papers in scientific journals that
focus on the topic of landscape changes has been increasing explosively during the
last two decades (Aspinall, 2006). Among many conferences, workshops and sem-
inars dealing with the topic of landscape changes, the seminar
Landscape change
and its ecological consequences in Europe
held in Tilburg in 1995, from which the
important report on the state of land use and landscape change in Europe in the
1990s was published (Jongman, 1996), should be mentioned. The importance of
recent landscape changes and their consequences are further discussed in the mono-
graph edited by Mander and Jongman (2000). The international seminar organised
in Norwegian Tromso in June 2006 has a concise title:
Landscape Change: Learning
from the past - Visions for the future.
Landscape is a theme in many disciplines, resulting in diverse approaches
(Antrop, 2008). The fast changes occurring today have caused the growing pop-
ularity of landscape itself and landscape changes in particular. A growing public
and political interest in landscape issues has resulted in the adoption of the
European Landscape Convention (Council of Europe, 2000). The great merit of the
Convention is that it initiated many programmes for studying landscapes in most
European countries as well as on the Pan-European level as never before (Antrop,
2008). The requirement to identify landscape types, to analyse their characteristics
and the forces and pressures which affect them as well as to take note of changes in
European landscapes is stressed in Article 6 (Specific measures) of the Convention.
Land use as well as general landscape changes are studied in the fields of both
geography and landscape ecology, apart from other scientific and applied disciplines
dealing with landscape issues. In the framework of the International Geographical
Search WWH ::
Custom Search