Application of state referential data and corine land cover database to estimation of landscape structure variety in selected protected areas in Kujawsko-Pomorskie voivodeship

Knowledge of a land cover is very essential to understand and know relations between a man and an environment. The land cover is closely related to the rest elements of geographic environment. It also illustrates the variety of the structure of geographic environment. Till the end of the last century, there were no data representing full, reliable and covering the whole country information about the land cover. Maps and studies over this element of landscape were based on other methods of mappings, various scales and spatial ranges. This fact made it impossible to make comparison analysis and to have proper conclusions concerning processes that were taking place. The realization of National Geographic Information Systems (NSIG) and works connected with the creation of CORINE Land Cover (CLC) is a big help in this field. It was impossible without the development of spatial imagery, universality of the application of spatial information systems, and the use of army materials in the civilian, formal cases. Source spatial data used on the paper, mutually supplement and cover one another. Research connected with the analysis of a landscape structure was done in the chosen protected areas in Kujawsko-Pomorskie Voivodeship. All (8) landscape parks were in the Voivodeship. Total area of the preserved territories is almost 12% of the total Voivodeship area, and represent various types of a natural landscape. The structure of the landscape in landscape parks was analyzed with the application of landscape indices. The following indices describing the structure of landscape were calculated and compared: a number of land cover classes, a number of patches, total length of the edge, a shape index, a fractal dimension, and Shannon’s diversity index. Comparisons of indices among parks were done in relation to various scales of source materials.