The implementation of the European Landscape Convention in Poland requires the identification and landscape assessment in the form of a landscape audit made for each region (voivodeship), as enshrined in the Act on Spatial Planning and Land Development. The Act assumes that as part of landscape audit within regional parks priority landscapes as well as zones of landscape protection will be indicated. There are methodical tools prepared by the Ministry of the Environment to realize both main landscape audit elements – the instruction and the recommendations. Currently (at the end of 2018) no region of the audit is yet to be found, and the newly adopted conservation plans for regional parks enforce, in accordance with the Nature Conservation Act reference to both priority landscapes and zones. This article presents testing of the methodology proposed by the Ministry of the Environment for determining priority landscapes (the instruction) and landscape protection zones (the recommendations). The reference field was the conservation plan for Brudzeń Landscape Park (BLP) located in the Masovian Voivodeship. An attempt to implement particularly the Instructions and identify priority landscapes in the BLP conservation plan proved to be not fully possible. The analyzes carried out in the BLP call for the opinion that apart from the current landscape, it is necessary to take into account other than land use features of the environment that determine the specificity of the landscape – mainly terrain, additionally the catalog of current types of landscapes should be open. Tools prepared by the Ministry of the Environment – still need to be refined.

157 nature reserves are situated in different parts of the spatial structure of Polish towns and cities. They were established at different times and often for different reasons than the nature reserves located outside Polish cities. Due to their location, urban reserves are very frequently used similarly to other green open spaces. The aim of this paper is to identify the main protection objectives of nature reserves located in towns and cities in order to find out to what extent their inevitable recreational use results in management problems. In order to identify the reserves' protection objectives and rules of recreational accessibility, a number of documents were examined: 111 designation acts (our analysis was limited to reserves located entirely within city or town borders), 35 management plans and 48 other regional ordinances. The research resulted in the following findings: a complicated and unclear formal situation of many surveyed reserves entails management problems, particularly in terms of their accessibility and recreational use. In theory, the current legal regulations allow for the introduction of rules concerning the recreational use of reserves and setting up of necessary facilities. However, in practice, this possibility is underused. It seems that nature reserves located in towns and cities require special attention, otherwise some of them will lose their natural values. The concept of the urban nature reserve should be considered as a solution.

The importance of green areas for the well-being of city dwellers, upgrading their living conditions and health, has been discussed in a great number of publications. Relatively few studies have been devoted to urban natural protected areas. These areas are distinct due to the very often conflicting goals of their establishment and the social functions that they perform. Legal regulations concerning the establishment and management of these areas in force in Poland do not take into account the conditions mentioned above. Therefore, it seems justified to change the regulations and to establish a separate form of nature protection, particularly in the case of the nature reserves, as these most often appear in Polish cities and have the highest protection status. In order to support or refute this stipulation, the urban nature reserve (UNR) visitors were questioned (through a survey available online for six months in 2018). Eight-hundred and sixty-nine respondents took part in the survey. It revealed that most of the respondents perceived nature reserves located in cities as recreational areas; however, they were also aware of their multifunctional character. Such results support the conclusion that in order to effectively manage this type of area in cities, a concept of distinctive urban conservation areas should be developed.