Recognizing Landscapes for the Purpose of Sustainable Development—Experiences from Poland

Landscape identification forms a base for landscape management and sustainable land use policy. According to the European Landscape Convention, each Member State needs to recognize the landscapes as an essential component of people’s surroundings. Poland developed a method for landscape auditing that will be conducted for landscapes in the whole country. The identification of landscape units is based on landscape type characteristics and spatial data that is layered and analyzed in order to identify landscape units. In this paper, we aim to test the possibilities of automatic landscape identification. We take the assumptions designed for landscape identification for the needs of the audit. Based on the “Typology of Poland’s current landscapes”, we design a process to identify landscape units with the use of the aggregation of land cover data and multivariable analysis. We use tools in an ArcGIS environment to design a process that will support human perception. Our approach is compared with the approach presented in the method designed for a landscape audit in order to be used for landscape unit identification at the municipal level. The case study area is the municipality of Siechnice within the suburban area of the city of Wroclaw, an example of a changing landscape under suburbanization pressure. We conclude that both approaches can support each other in the landscape identification process.