ABSTRACT
Rapid changes in the landscapes have occurred very frequently in the European continent in the last decades. These changes, characterized as a ‘crisis of the landscape’ by Lemaire (2002) and described in the Dobríš Assessment (Stanners and Bourdeau 1995) caused loss of regional diversity, landscape character and identity. Many new European initiatives were set up, indicating a general renewed interest in landscape research and policy. The most important is the Council of Europe’s European Landscape Convention. Its aim is to promote integrated landscape planning. One of the specific measures is to identify and describe the landscapes covering the entire territory, by making an inventory of the significant features that characterize them (Council of Europe 2000). Even before it entered into force on 1. March 2004, many initiatives started in different countries to set up new landscape inventories. However, these different landscape typologies do not fit at the national administrative borders and are not comparable because of different approaches, data sources, and methods (Wascher 2005). Trans-border problems in landscape classifications also exist at regional level within states. Examples are differences between England, Scotland, and Wales, in the UK, between Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels Capital region, in Belgium, between the regional atlases in France (Lunginbühl 1994), in the biotope mapping of the federal state of Germany (Jessel 2006). Even between smaller administration units (counties, provinces) the classifications may not match at the borders (Stiles 2005). In addition, landscape inventories of different subject (forest areas, build up areas, heritage values, …) can vary between regions (Antrop and Van Eetvelde 2000). These differences are caused by the use of different source materials (scale, period, data quality), different methods and scale levels and also different aims established for the inventories or classifications, which makes comparison of data difficult (Antrop and Van Eetvelde 2000; Jessel 2006).
