urbanization, landscape change, Urban Atlas, cadastral statistics

The paper analyzes the land cover and land use (LUC) change in three Czech functional urban areas (FUA): České Budějovice, Hradec Králové and Ostrava. The selection of these FUAs was made with regard to differences in size, historical development, position within the state, settlement structure and economic base. Urban Atlas (UA) data and cadastral statistics data for period 2006 – 2012 were used to analyze landscape change and to demonstrate main differences between these two datasets. Moreover, land cover flows were analyzed using UA data to identify the main processes that have taken place in each FUA. The results identified divergent and also coincident general trends in LUC in both data sets. Results showed that most urbanization occurred on agricultural land, with similar causes but different extent between studied FUAs and used data sources (losses of agricultural land ranging from 200 to 2,000 hectares). The main identified processes were sprawl of economic sites and infrastructures and urban residential sprawl. Only the FUA Ostrava recorded decline more than 200 ha in built-up areas (based on cadastral statistics) despite the urban sprawl in the hinterland of cities. Such decline can be attributed to the impacts of economic transformation and extensive reclamation processes in former hard coal mining areas. The resulting differences between UA data and cadastral statistics stem mainly from the different methodology of data collection, inconsistency between the legal status (registration of land type in the land register) and the real state of the area in the landscape. Despite these problems, coupling of UA data and cadastral statistics seems to be valuable for assessing the direction of development of urban areas as landscape dynamics can be assessed from two independent sources.