ABSTRACT
All land cannot be given the same priority for protection, or for planning and management. Even with the modern, powerful, all-pervasive approach to environmental management of sustainability in land and resource use, some focus of effort or activity and thus some selection of territory is inevitable. Some parts of landscapes may need to be more intensively exploited in order to protect others. The selection of nature reserves and of other areas of special wildlife interest, would be difficult to envisage in the absence of an accepted hierarchical classification of species and biotopes. Despite their essentially abstract nature, such classifications are particularly useful and can also be practical tools for the selection of special landscapes. Once recorded, described and classified, landscapes and landscape types are amenable to evaluation in a similar way to that used for species and biotopes. Thus threatened and valuable landscapes may be identified from the basis of systematic inventories of all regional or national landscapes (Chapter 3).
