Abstract
Agricultural land losses represent the main trend of landscape development in Czechia since the late 19th century. This paper will be focused primarily on the discussion of data, indicators and tools used to evaluate losses of agricultural land (especially arable land) and extensification processes in different regions of the Czech countryside: grassing and afforestation.
First, the long-term evaluation of these processes will be presented. Cadastral data is used in the study and have been processed into a Database of long-term land use changes in Czechia (1845-2010), see Bičík et al. (2015).
The main objective is to evaluate the regional patterns of these processes and special attention will be paid on differences in land use changes in mountain, foothills and lowland regions. The following part concentrates in a similar way on current changes since 1990.
Qualitative distinction from previous time periods will be discussed as well as new data types available (remote sensing). Different methods lead to quite different resulting images of the importance of land use changes in diverse regions of Czechia, therefore, the aim of this paper is to identify the most important areas of actual agricultural land losses in the Czech countryside.
The major "hot spots" of landscape changes are identified and an interpretation of the results (using a driving forces concept) is accomplished.