Land-use and cover change (LUCC) impacts global environmental changes. Therefore, it is crucial to obtain cross-national level LUCC data that represents past and actual LUCC. As urban areas exhibit the most significant dynamics of the changes, accompanied by such processes as urban sprawl, it seems desirable to take into account LUCC information from such areas to acquire national level information. The paper analyses land-use changes (LUCs) in urban areas in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia. The analysis is based on functional urban area (FUA) data from the European Urban Atlas project for 2006 and 2012. The area of urbanised land grew at the expense of agricultural areas, semi-natural areas, and wetlands over the investigated period in all three countries. The authors determined LUC direction models in urban areas based on the identified land-use change. The proposed LUC direction models for the investigated period and area should offer national level LUC data for such purposes as modelling of future changes or can be the point of reference for planning analyses. The paper proposes the following models: mean model, median model, weighted mean model where the weight is the urbanised to vegetated area ratio, and weighted mean model where the weight is the share of urbanised areas. According to the proposed LUC models, areas considered as urbanised grow in FUAs on average in six years by 5.5900‰ in Czechia, 7.5936‰ in Poland, and 4.0769‰ in Slovakia. Additionally, the change models facilitated determination of a LUC dynamics ratio in each country. It reached the highest values in Poland and the lowest in Slovakia.

SummaryThe suburban areas are lands under strong anthropogenic pressure which results in their significant transformation. Identifying the direction of changes and their intensity is the basis of research based on the analysis of land use and land cover. The study involved the analysis of land cover in the area of suburban zone of the city of Krakow based on the vector geodata available in the European Environment Agency database (Urban Atlas download service). Geographic data were classified according to various categories of coverage. The area was divided into evaluation clusters that included covering buffer zones with the given parameters according to the distance from the city: zones 0-5 km, 5-10 km, 10-15 km and 15-20 km. All analyzes were performed by means of the QGIS software using geoprocessing tools and additional ones of spatial statistics (among other things Group Stats). The percentage of each category of coverage in relation to the total area was made for each of the separate buffer zones' statements. The theory of changing the structure of coverage categories along with diverging from the city according to the diagram of reducing participation of heavily anthropogenic areas to those less exposed to it was confirmed on the basis of this analysis. Keywords GIS • QGIS • Urban Atlas • land cover • buffer zones

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The land use mix (LUM) is among the critical issues in spatial planning because it can determine the occurrence and structure of various land use and cover types (LUC) and prevent any adverse patterns. The paper focuses on the LUM in functional urban areas (FUAs) in Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary. The research employed Urban Atlas (UA) data on LUC in 2006 and 2012 to characterise LUM in the FUAs. The research follows the division of the FUA into the urban area (urban core, UC) and its functional surroundings (commuting zones, CZ). We further characterised the phenomena investigated for the entire country, region, and Europe using Corine Land Cover (CLC) data. The LUM was quantified with the entropy index (EI), dissimilarity index (DI), and multi-dimensional balance index (MBI). The EI demonstrated that the investigated FUAs went through more substantial LUM changes than the 27 European Union member states (EU27) from 2006 to 2012. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that LUM overspill was more intensive in CZs than in UCs on the regional and national levels. We found out that urbanised areas grew at the expense of agricultural areas in both UCs and CZs with similar dynamics in 2006–2012 in all the analysed countries.

The objective of this paper is the assessment of the share of individual land cover categories in centric and ring-shaped evaluation polygons. In the analyses the data from the Corine Land Cover project for 2006 and 2012 were used. These data are available through the Urban Atlas. The basic spatial statistics concerning the land cover categories were determined. As a result of the analyses, information about land cover changes that took place over a period of 6 years was obtained, observed with increasing distance from the assumed reference point. An inference was also made regarding the possibility of determining the changes taking place in selected units in the period of 2006-2012.