Land registers as a source of studying long-term land-use changes

Abstract

Land registers, or cadasters, contain information on land use because this is vital for land assessment and taxation. Some European countries produced land registers covering their entire territories as early as the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg Monarchy produced the Franciscean Cadaster, also known as the Stable Cadaster, which shows the traditional preindustrial cultural landscape and makes it possible to analyze land-use changes or the transformation of the traditional cultural landscape. This special issue is the result of collaboration between Slovenian and Czech geographers, and it features six articles covering land-use changes from the perspective of natural geography, political geography, ecosystems, farms, and metrics. The articles, which explore the processes of changes at the national and regional levels, are based on the textual part of the Franciscan Cadaster, and the local studies are based on the cartographic part of the cadaster.