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Orchard meadows are appreciated as an integrated land use of high cultural and biological value. While such meadows are typical habitats for temperate Europe, they experienced a decline in their total area during the second half of the 20th century, both in Western and Eastern Europe. In this contribution, we compare their current area and status in terms of semantics, law, public support in general, and the efficiency of public support in both Saxony and the Czech Republic. We estimated the area in Saxony on the basis of three public mapping projects. In the Czech Republic, where no recent mapping included orchard meadows as a specific land-use type, we carried out our own mapping. Hence, we mapped 124 randomly selected plots of 1 km2. To cross-reference results from both countries, we used the pan-EU project LUCAS (Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey). According to various different sources, the orchard meadows cover 0.09–0.55% of Saxony and 0.01–0.72% of the Czech Republic. Interestingly, the results of the three mapping projects conducted in Saxony vary from each other. Although orchard meadows are supported by financial incentives of the respective governments in both countries, the Saxon approach concentrating more on individual activities (sanitation of old trees, planting, grassland management), seems more focused than the single measure practised in the Czech Republic. One key to a greater public awareness of the orchard meadow problematic can lie in the promotion of a simple expression referring to this specific landscape feature in Czech, similar to the phrase common in the German language: ‘Streuobstwiese’. Our suggestion for the Czech language is: ‘luční sad’.

Historical and archival sources are of cardinal importance in landscape research addressing the processes and course of landscape changes in European regions. The Franziscean cadastre from the 19th century is among the most widely used historical sources in Central Europe. We identified 1440 records, finally providing 104 articles reporting the use of the Franziscean cadastre for in-depth analyses in order to identify (i) the practice of the cadastral data processing, (ii) purpose and spatial extent of the study, (iii) use of complementary sources and (iv) particular land use/land cover classes under study. We have found the increasing attention towards the Franziscean cadastre as a source for landscape research reflected by the doubling number of records in the past decade with majority of the case studies located in Czechia (79), followed by Austria (9) and Italy (3). We have identified the trends in the use in landscape trajectory research and application to hydrology, agriculture and forestry. As regards the data processing, several issues connected with the methodology or design of the records were found (e.g. geographic information system processing description and data source specification). We further problematize the suitability of the supplementary data used and conclude our review with a set of recommendations to contribute to the discussion on the methodology of landscape reconstruction with historical datasets.

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