Landscape as a Geosystem

Book excerpt: The book analyses the landscape as a geosystem in all its complexity (from the abiotic environment, and land use to socio-economic character) as an integrated natural resource, as society’s life space, as well as an object of planning and decision making on sustainable land use. It presents the landscape properties in the form of databases that comply with the INSPIRE Directive 2007/2/EC (INSPIRE – Infrastructure for Spatial InfoRmation in Europe) requirements, which can be used for a variety of purposes and can serve as a national spatial information database for the needs of applied landscape-ecological research and real-world spatial planning processes. The book also provides overview legends with complete domain values of selected attributes of all three landscape structures (primary, secondary and tertiary) routinely used in Slovakia. Lastly, the book offers an example of the construction and mapping of geocomplexes as well as the database creation on the model territory at the regional level.