Results
The landscape in the study area has undergone changes in
land cover (Fig. 3 and Table 1), which have affected the landscape
memory structure. Built-up areas, grassland and non-forest wood
elements are among the categories that have changed considerably.
Fig. 3 shows that “built-up area and other” land cover, together
with “industrial” land cover grew 8-fold from 1.3 to 10.7%, mostly
at the expense of grassland (decreased from 17.6 to 5.9.%), and gardens
(decreased by 1.8% from 4.0 to 2.2.%). Unlike this decrease
in ecological elements, the “non forest wood” land cover propagated
approximately 4 times from 1.8 to 8.0%. Figs. 5–7 provide
the absolute representation and the percentage representation of
the landscape memory elements, in hectares, including an absolute
comparison with the area that had the same land cover types
in 1839. Referring to the land cover changes in Fig. 3, all landscape
memory elements in the individual land cover categories
decreased, as presented in Fig. 5a and b. In absolute terms, 27 ha of
landscape memory elements used as arable land were turned into
other land cover, and similarly 25 ha of grassland ceased to form
the landscape memory. Fig. 6 then shows an overview of the proportional
changes of the individual landscape memory elements, as
compared to Fig. 7, which provides information on the proportion
of ecological landscape structures. In this way, the figures show the
degree of stability and maintenance of the components of the landscape
structure. Fig. 6 also enables us to make a mutual assessment
and comparison of the individual landscape memory elements. It
also shows that non-forest wood elements are the most stable elements
in land cover and location (83.6% of the category in 1839
persisted throughout the period until 2002) and are therefore stable
in the landscape memory structure. Further, it is obvious that
arable land has the second largest share in the creation of the landscape
structure (76.1% of the arable land from 1839 was still arable
land in 2002). Built-up areas and roads also have a high share in the
landscape memory. By contrast, permanent grassland has the least
stable character (only 9.7% of the permanent grass stands survived
from 1839 until 2002). Fig. 7 shows that only 16.1% of the ecological
land cover (gardens, grasslands and non-forest wood elements)
retained the same cover all through the period under consideration.
The figure also illustrates that in the overall assessment of the
study area the total area of all landscape memory elements takes
up 59.8% of the territory; in other words, the cover of 59.8% of the
territory remained the same throughout the period under consideration.
Fig. 4 shows the overall structure of the landscape memory,
especially the balance between those land cover types that persisted
until 2002 and “white” space, which refers to the part of the
landscape that underwent a change (i.e., using the terminology of
our paper, this part of the landscape has lost its memory).