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Detailed information about land use is available from the mid-nineteenth century onward for the countries of the former Habsburg Monarchy. For Slovenia and Czechia, databases have been created that make it possible to analyze the period from the first half of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. The processes of changing land use were comparable during the period examined. Nonetheless, the cultural landscape in Czechia was significantly more transformed. Because of the nationalization of land after the Second World War and the establishment of state-owned collective farms and cooperatives, today large complexes of farmland predominate, whereas in Slovenia fragmented properties still predominate, and the cultural landscape therefore preserves many more elements from the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land registers, or cadasters, contain information on land use because this is vital for land assessment and taxation. Some European countries produced land registers covering their entire territories as early as the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Habsburg Monarchy produced the Franciscean Cadaster, also known as the Stable Cadaster, which shows the traditional preindustrial cultural landscape and makes it possible to analyze land-use changes or the transformation of the traditional cultural landscape. This special issue is the result of collaboration between Slovenian and Czech geographers, and it features six articles covering land-use changes from the perspective of natural geography, political geography, ecosystems, farms, and metrics. The articles, which explore the processes of changes at the national and regional levels, are based on the textual part of the Franciscan Cadaster, and the local studies are based on the cartographic part of the cadaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]