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compared to the data from CORINE (see Najman, 2008 for details). Actually, a
portion of the plots registered as “arable land” in the cadastre was covered with
grasslands or in fallow in reality. The amount of unused arable land was rising until
2004 (when the Czech Republic joined the EU), finally reaching approximately 7-
8% of the whole area of arable land in 2003 (about 300.000 ha - Zelená zpráva,
2003). Similarly, the CORINE database recognizes some tracts of dead forests in
the Šumava mountains as grasslands, because of the high amount of green shrubs
and grass below the dead trees.
However, using both methods led to similar conclusions within the territory
and time period (Czech borderland in the years 1990 and 2000), implying a gen-
eral ability of both datasets to capture the most significant trends occurring in the
landscape.
Our research proved that regions along the former Iron Curtain, when com-
pared to the interior, are typical of a lower anthropogenic pressure on landscape
(less arable land and built up areas, more grasslands and forested areas), and of a
steeper decline of this pressure (afforestation on grasslands, grassing over on arable
land). Border regions act as “hot-spots” of land-use changes. As a result of general
modernisation of “socio-economic metabolism”, (Krausmann et al., 2003; Fischer-
Kowalski & Haberl, 2007) border regions are being strongly extensified, taken out
of traditional agricultural use, and transformed to satisfy other needs of modern
society (nature and water protection, recreation, tourism). Thus, productive func-
tion, necessary in every locality in the era of closed local material and energetic
cycles of the pre-industrial economy, is being replaced by non-productive functions
in the era of open national or even global cycles of the industrial and post-industrial
economy.
All figures presented here document deeper land-cover changes on the east-
ern side of the former Iron Curtain. Furthermore, the same types of changes with
the same intensity did not take place on both sides of the borders. In the east-
ern part of the studied territory, there were more common processes leading to
extensification, connected with a loss of support for agricultural production. On the
western side, a more even distribution of changes among all possible types can be
seen.
But the political border in the form of the former Iron Curtain was only one
factor influencing differentiation of land use in the borderland. Other important
factors were natural condition (soil productivity, altitude, slope, etc.) and also socio-
economic characteristics (e.g., density of population, spatial exposedness) - in other
words, functioning of the so-called “differential rent I” (Jelecek, 2002). Moreover,
on the Czech side of the Iron Curtain, the expulsion of Czech Germans after WWII
(ca. 1945-1947) and consequent non-perfect repopulation of these regions in the
period of the totalitarian regime (1948-1989) had a large influence on the landscape
in those regions. And this huge transfer of population and massive social and eco-
nomic change was an important driving force of land-use changes even more than
40 years later - in the period after 1990. The behaviour of the new (relatively sparse)
population, its problematic relationship to agriculture, farming, land and landscape
were important factors leading to a large-scale land abandonment, grassing-over
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