Changing rural landscapes along the border of Austria and the Czech Republic between 1952 and 2009: Roles of political, socioeconomic and environmental factors Petr Sklenicka * , Petra  Símová, Kate  rina Hrdinová, Miroslav Salek Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Kamycka 129, Prague 165 21, Czech Republic Keywords: Landscape structure Land-cover changes Land-use policy Landscape heterogeneity Agriculture land Landscape metrics abstract Cross-border research enables studying the importance of broad-scale political and socioeconomic fac- tors on land-cover changes. Our plot-based study using GIS analysis of interpreted aerial photographs evaluates changes in rural landscape patterns on both sides of the AustrianeCzech border during 1952 e2009. The method compares 20 pairs of 1  1 km unit square samples distributed along the entire common border and equally divided into four growing regions. Our findings confirm the key significance of historically dissimilar political and socioeconomic systems in the two countries that led to the occurrence of decidedly different farmland and landscape patterns in similar environmental conditions. Broad-scale political and socioeconomic factors also markedly affected the rates of change and direction of trends in landscape development during the examined period. The variability of environmental conditions had a similar influence in the two countries on the proportions of farmland and of permanent elements. We did not, however, confirm an influence of the environmental factors on heterogeneity of the landscapes. Overall, the study presents a markedly more homogenous landscape pattern in the Czech Republic than in Austria. While between 1952 and 2009 the agricultural landscapes increased in ho- mogeneity in both countries, this occurred more so in the Czech Republic than in Austria. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The influence of humankind, which is the most important factor affecting the structure and functioning of ecosystems (Vitousek, Mooney, Lubchenco, & Melillo, 1997), can be observed both on a direct level (i.e., reflecting individual decisions of the owners or tenants of the land) and, more typically, on an indirect level, which means the political and socioeconomic level (Dale, O’Neill, Pedlowski, & Southworth, 1993). This influence becomes the main driver of land-use change, as it determines local factors (Lambin et al., 2001). Despite that these are crucial factors, the importance of broad-scale political and socioeconomic factors on land-cover changes has been little explored, particularly due to the fact that these factors cannot be altered experimentally (Kuemmerle, Radeloff, Perzanowski, & Hostert, 2006). A good and practical approach is comparative study that evaluates changes in two or more regions or countries having different political and socioeco- nomic predictors (e.g., Southworth et al., 2011). There have been several cross-border studies focused on land- use/land-cover (LULC) changes (e.g., Klug, Gottsmann, & Heredia, 2005; Scott & Buechler, 2013; Tasser, Walde, Tappeiner, Teutsch, & Noggler, 2007), but these mostly have been designed as case studies. Kupkova, Bicik, and Najman (2013) analyzed the speed of land-cover changes in the territory of the Czech Republic and in the border areas of Austria and Germany using aggregated statistical data from cadasters. We have found no studies in the expert liter- ature that at the plot-scale level would systematically map the differences between two or more countries depending on selected indicators such that the results could be generalized. We likewise have found no studies that would systematically evaluate the spatial pattern changes along the entire border of two neighboring states while considering the regionally or locally changing envi- ronmental or socioeconomic factors in the given states as well as the different political developments of the two states. In this respect, our contribution is the first to introduce such an approach. Europe provides a study area advantageous for this type of research, as it includes two large groups of states: The first group of states went through a relatively continuous development as * Corresponding author. Tel.: þ420 776 323 824; fax: þ420 234 381 848. E-mail addresses: sklenicka@fzp.czu.cz (P. Sklenicka), simova@fzp.czu.cz (P.  Símová), hrdinovak@fzp.czu.cz (K. Hrdinová), salek@fzp.czu.cz (M. Salek). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Applied Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apgeog 0143-6228/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.12.006 Applied Geography 47 (2014) 89e98