Land reforms reflected in the farming landscape in East Bohemia and in Southern Sweden – Two faces of modernisation

Abstract

The issue of monitoring landscape changes at the national scale has recently been investigated by a number of authors. However, there is a lack of any comparative analyses that examines the similarities and differences between different landscapes, and why these might exist. The aim of this paper is to analyze the development of intensively utilized agricultural landscapes in the Czech Republic and in Sweden, two countries with different political history, where land reforms have been particularly effective. This paper presents two case studies, both of which are located on old cultural landscapes; Honbice (244 ha) in East Bohemia and Lilla Uppåkra (321 ha) in Southern Sweden. Three critical sources of data analysis were employed in this study to evaluate landscape parameters: old maps (from 1703, 1815, and 1839), and aerial photographs (from 1936, 1939, 1950, 1966, 2003 and 2004), together with field mapping of the landscape. In this study, arable land is the main subject of research, as it is the decisive landscape segment that reflects the progress of land reform. The following quantitative characteristics have been monitored: Area (P) in hectares or as a percentage of the categories, Relative frequency of landscape elements (fragmentation) in No ha−1, Relative frequency in No ha−1, and Average size of the elements in hectares. However, the greatest challenge in the use of the data is the combination of different types of materials, e.g. old Stable Cadastre maps (large scale cadastral maps whose accuracy can only be assumptive) and current and historical aerial photographs (medium scale, showing the real state of the landscape). The results of the study show that the differing socioeconomic systems of the modern times resulted in similar patterns of arable land use, although the changes were timed differently. The driving forces behind the socio-economic and geo-political conditions in these countries are obviously reported to be different. For example, in Sweden the economic driving forces have mainly underlain arable land changes, whereas the changes in the Czech Republic between the late 1940s and the late 1980s were principally political, resulting in a significant impact upon the physical landscape. The characteristic large-scale Soviet-type system of farming was introduced in many parts of the country with an agriculturally-based model of Russian kolkhozes. The analysis may help us to understand the patterns of long-term landscape evolution in the context of these two locations in Europe. From a methodological point of view, the results of the study are useful for other applied disciplines, e.g. geography, history, and land-use planning.