Urban sprawl is generally defined as the urbanization of space adjacent to a city, which results from that city’s development. The discussed phenomenon involves land development, mainly agricultural land, in the proximity of cities, the development of infrastructure, and an increase in the number of residents who rely on urban services and commute to work in the city. Urban sprawl generates numerous problems which, in the broadest sense, result from the difficulty in identifying the boundaries of the central urban unit and the participation of local inhabitants, regardless of their actual place of residence, in that unit’s functional costs. These problems are associated not only with tax collection rights but with difficulties in measuring the extent of urban sprawl in research and local governance. The aim of this study was to analyze the applicability of the CORINE Land Cover (CLC) database for monitoring urbanization processes, including the dynamic process of urban sprawl. Polish cities with county rights, i.e., cities that implement independent spatial planning policies, were analyzed in the study to determine the pattern of urban sprawl in various types of cities. Buffer zones composed of municipalities that are directly adjacent to the central urban unit were mapped around the analyzed cities. The study proposes a novel method for measuring the extent of suburbanization with the use of the CLC database and Geographic Information System (GIS) tools. The developed method relies on the overgrowth of urbanization (OU) index calculated based on CLC data. The OU index revealed differences in the rate of urbanization in three groups of differently sized Polish cities. The analysis covered two periods: 2006–2012 and 2012–2018, and it revealed that urban sprawl in the examined cities proceeded in an unstable manner over time. The results of the present study indicate that the CLC database is a reliable source of information about urbanization processes.

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Eutrophication is one of the major threats to the quality of water in high mountain lakes. The inflow of elements having biological origin may significantly aggravate the ecological status of those ecosystems. For this reason, the aim of this study was to map and assess the impact of anthropogenic pressure on alpine lakes in the valley of Dolina Pięciu Stawów Polskich (known in English as the Valley of Five Polish Lakes) in the Tatra National Park in Poland. The effects of tourism and easy access to alpine lakes on changes in their ecological status were determined. Tourist trails were evaluated based on the difficulty of access to the water surface of analyzed alpine lakes, with a method developed for assessing anthropogenic pressure on aquatic ecosystems. The method, deployed for the first time in 2019, was modified and adapted to the local environmental conditions in the research area. The results of this study indicate that tourism pressure contributes to the growth of submerged vegetation in alpine lakes. The presence of aquatic plants (including vascular plants) shows ecosystem response to water enrichment with biogenic substances. The present findings were used to formulate practical recommendations and propose modifications to the evaluated hiking trails. The research method developed in the study can support analysis and control of tourist traffic, thus reducing anthropogenic pressure on alpine lakes in national parks located in mountain areas.

Quantitative, qualitative and structural changes in land use that occur in a given location over time are a manifestation and a measure of urban development. Urbanisation is a process of spatial diffusion that spreads from the urban core to peripheral areas. Urban development is linked with human activities in a specific location and in a given period of time. In the context of spatial management, urbanisation is a process where less intensive land-use types are replaced by more intensive forms of land use. The demand for new land for residential development, the search for alternative locations for housing construction and the development of sustainable land management plans require new methods that support decision-making in the process of land conversion in peri-urban areas. The aim of this study was to develop a methodology for identifying and localising the boundaries of urban development with the use of the fuzzy set theory and to analyse the rate of changes in land use based on data for 2005–2010–2017. The proposed method supports the identification and localisation of urbanised areas and an evaluation of the degree of urbanisation in the interval [0,1]. The case study was conducted in the Polish city of Olsztyn.

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