Assessment of Local Knowledge About Land Use Relevant to Landscape Planning in a Case Study Area in Lowland Slovakia

Public perception and knowledge of land use changes, and preferences for future landscape development, can contribute to planning processes at different levels from the local to the national. Participatory processes and use of local knowledge are necessary for precise planning purposes and management of public affairs. This paper analyses the results of sociological research with regard to landscape development in Nová Vieska village in the Podunajská nížina lowland in Slovakia. The survey aimed to analyse the answers of local inhabitants and key stakeholders in the field of perception of land-use changes and their causes and biodiversity changes since 1990, as well as expectations of future land use and the driving forces of rural development. Local inhabitants were more likely to perceive changes in the productive parts of the study area (the decline of orchards and gardens, overgrowth of meadows and pastures, etc.), while key stakeholders perceived a broader range of changes in land use. According to the local inhabitants, the disintegration of cooperative farms was the main cause of the land use changes, and unsettled land ownership is the biggest obstacle to development of agricultural production. Key stakeholders cited economic, environmental (climate change) and social causes (ageing of population, change of life style, etc.) as the most important factors in land use change and they also perceived them as the most important obstacles for agricultural development. Local inhabitants (as well as key stakeholders) wished for an increase of the proportion of managed meadows and pastures, gardens, orchards, wetlands and non-forest vegetation, but they expect the opposite trend. The results confirmed that public knowledge of landscape development could provide substantial useful information for future development planning.