Landscapes reflect both historic and current cultural and socio-economic activities of human societies. Accordingly, as human societies change, the landscape changes as well. Agriculture is the main driver of landscape changes in the Czech Republic. Therefore, it is necessary to devote special attention to agricultural practices and define simple but effective steps to improve landscape mosaics towards a sustainable development. In this study, regional information about historic changes in landscape structure was studied to (1) identify the trends in land use/cover development since 1940 to 2010 and (2) determine the impact of land use change on the resulting heterogeneity of the landscape. The overall purpose was to find areas of compromise which would allow strengthening of landscape structure and thus stabilize its functions. We specified trends of land use/cover development in 15 catchments with varying agriculture intensity. We digitalized aerial photographs from 1940, 1960, and 1990 and orthophotomaps from 2010. Then, we used a heterogeneity index to define landscape heterogeneity in all catchments and time horizons. The results of our research confirmed increasing tillage effort in intensively cultivated areas, support of secondary succession processes in marginalized areas, and overall increase in forest area. Our study found that simplification and homogenization of the landscape mosaic took place in all studied areas, with the steepest decline found in areas with high agriculture intensity. However, linear vegetation proved to be a suitable starting point for a targeted effort to increase heterogeneity and thus seemed to be crucial for sustainable development of landscape functions in agroecosystems.

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Fragmentation is a complex issue and the way it is framed will impact policy decisions. The Czech Republic has adopted several strategic policy documents in spatial planning and environmental domains that address fragmentation. However, these documents differ in how they frame fragmentation. Our goal was to evaluate the differences in 1) framing the problem of fragmentation and 2) suggested solutions. We performed a content analysis of the strategic policy documents by coding text using the key fragmentation aspectsbiological organization, land cover, and connectivity. Next, we categorized data either to species-oriented, pattern-oriented, or ecosystem service frames and suggested criteria to evaluate the quality of the framing. This method was useful to show the divergences in the framing of fragmentation as a problem between two policy domains. The results show that the pattern oriented frame and mitigation solutions are the most prominent aspects, and also fragmentation is not well framed.

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Uncoordinated land development results in landscape fragmentation, which is a complex and serious environmental threat to the Czech landscape. It poses a challenge especially for (post)industrial urban agglomerations with extremely low connectivity of green–blue infrastructure. Environmental and spatial planning strategic policy documents are considered to represent long-term communicative instruments for effective environmental protection. Current experience shows that policy documents are commonly poorly integrated, and burdened by formulation inconsistencies. In this study, we (i) specified the driving factors causing landscape fragmentation, describing how the issue is understood by environmental and spatial planning strategic policy documents and (ii) identified criteria for the formulation of these documents at the national and regional governance levels. A content analysis of 12 strategic policy documents enabled the calculation of internal consistency and an assessment of their inter- and cross-sectoral integration. The results revealed formulation flaws in documents, leading to serious misunderstandings of the meaning of the landscape fragmentation between environmental (biocentric) and planning (anthropocentric) policy domains. This aspect makes the horizontal and further vertical cooperation between policy domains difficult. Guidelines for the formulation of strategic policy documents may improve their intelligibility and support smoother environmental policy integration.