Pre-industrial landscape of the Jeseníky mountains as a naturaland cultural heritage

Nowadays, any culturally developed human society focuses its attention on natural and cultural, respectively historical heritage. In addition to protected areas and heritage sites, the industrial heritage is also in the center of interest. Somewhat aside, there is a well-preserved common (not an artificial park) cultural landscape from the period before the Industrial Revolution. In the Czech Republic, there is no covering inventory of segments of the pre-industrial landscape. Any legislative protection, even any regular management of such heritage still absents. The collectivization of agriculture and the nationalization of forests in the period of real socialism led to the merging of land of small owners into large homogeneous areas, which completely overlaid the centuries-old varied mosaic of fields, meadows and forests. The land privatization after economic and political changes in the former Czechoslovakia after 1990 strengthened the trend of land consolidation. Small parcels of agricultural land are rare in the present landscape and become the subject of interests of the state protection of the nature, the landscape and the environment. At the same time, such areas represent interesting subjects for the local administration as attractive tourist object that can bring visitors to the sites. In the historical territory of Moravia (the eastern 1/3 of the Czech Republic), a regional inventory of areas with preserved ancient land use structure was carried out on all individual cadastral territories (focused not only on small parcels, but also on large aristocratic estates on agricultural and forest land originated before the main wave of industrial revolution Moravia, before 1850. Each site was assessed from 10 points of view. All localities were inserted into the geo-database and their multivariate analysis was performed to estimate the rules of their spatial distribution pattern. The geo-database itself is also a testimony to their current state and level of threat. The sites are still subjects to topic economic pressure on land consolidation and large-scale land use. Their existence in the future is under threat and is decreasing every year both in number and size. The paper demonstrates the results of inventory, documentation and evaluation of identified segments of pre-industrial landscape of Moravia.