Proposal zonation in the national parks and landscape protection areas of the Slovak Republic

From the very first settlements in Slovakia, different tribes which later became nations were using all the resources accessible in nature. These anthropological forces helped to shape nature slowly to the form in which that we recognize it now. In the beginning humans settled on the areas next to the big rivers and later on continued towards the springs until they inhabited all. Places in which they didn’t settle, they actively used for other purposes. So we can assume that there is not any area which was not influenced by human activity. Nowadays we can hardly deduce how Slovakia would look like without anthropological forces. On the other hand, we can’t say that human species were continuously destroying all that had ever existed, because the opposite is true. The exact way how our predecessors lived here caused heterogeneity of biotopes and therefore also diversity of species. Species adapted to biotopes such as pastures and meadows which wouldn’t exist without human activities because otherwise Slovakia would be covered by forest accounting 97 percent of the surface (exceptions would be a few biotopes such as bog, fen, alpine, etc.). It’s necessary to say that people are also responsible for the extinction of many species but that’s more a consequence of their lack of knowledge because if they would understand the importance of every species in the ecosystem they would probably act differently. Because of the fact that we know have a greater knowledge of nature, it is our duty to establish adequate forms of conservation. If we compare Slovakia with other European countries we find that Slovakia is second in the list of countries analyzed by percentage of protected areas in Europe, three times more than the average of all countries in the European Union. However this fact doesn’t mean anything if there isn’t any functional management of protection. Therefore our team suggests improvement by dividing every protected area in four different zones. Each of those zones is specified by activities which are allowed and others which are banned by the Slovak law system.