IENE 2016

Landscape fragmentation represents one of the most important issues of current landscape protection. Roads and highways with heavy traffic volume (and moreover often fenced) create long impermeable barriers, which cause enormous negative impact on dispersing or even migrating animal species. Total length of such structures as well as the traffic volume is rapidly increasing within last decades. Poster presents outputs of analysis of the fragmentation development since 1926 till nowadays including prognosis until 2020.

The level of fragmentation was quantified by using Effective Mesh Size method (Jaeger et al. 2000) within square fields of regular grid 1x1km overlapping the area of the Czech Republic. Roads of all levels and urban areas larger than 25 ha were used as fragmentation geometry. Database of historical road system developed by team of Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics of Faculty of Science (Hudeček et al. 2012) was used for analysis of roads development and historical topographical maps and CORINE Land Cover database for definition of urban areas. Finally, assessment of landscape quality was provided by analysis of level of providing ecosystem services (Burkhard et al. 2012).

Outputs show significant increase of landscape fragmentation with several enormous changing steps caused by construction of highways of urban sprawl. Assessment of quality of non-fragmented landscape brings interesting outputs from the conservation point of view. Gap analysis of spatial distributions of protected landscape areas (NP, PLA, NATURA 2000 sites) and non-fragmented landscape patches shows important facts for current landscape and transport policies.