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This study presents an analysis and visual representation of landscape diversity in the Czech Republic. The Czech Republic is administratively subdivided into regions, which are further subdivided into districts; the basic territorial units used for the calculation of diversity were the districts. Landscape diversity was calculated from the freely available CORINE Land Cover (CLC) data for the Czech Republic. Additional data (the district and region layers) were taken from the digital vector geographic database of the Czech Republic ArcČR® 500. TheMain Map(scale 1:600,000) shows landscape diversity calculated on the basis of Shannon entropy. For the purposes of visual representation, the effective number of categories in each district were calculated; the map also shows the prevailing type of land cover in each district. For comparison, an accompanying map shows landscape diversity at the regional level. Other accompanying maps contain information on CLC data, which is closely connected with landscape diversity. The four accompanying maps are at a scale of 1:1,800,000. Further information is also presented in addition to the maps (representation of CLC categories in the Czech Republic, brief texts characterizing the basic methodology used: CLC and the calculation of landscape diversity). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies that explore species-environment relationships at a broad scale are usually limited by the availability of sufficient habitat description, which is often too coarse to differentiate natural habitat patches. Therefore, it is not well understood how the distribution of natural habitats affects broad-scale patterns in the distribution of animal species. In this study, we evaluate the role of field-mapped natural habitats, land-cover types derived from remote sensing and climate on the composition of assemblages of five distinct animal groups, namely non-volant mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and butterflies native to the Czech Republic. First, we used variation partitioning based on redundancy analysis to evaluate the extent to which the environmental variables and their spatial structure might underlie the observed spatial patterns in the composition of animal assemblages. Second, we partitioned variations explained by climate, natural habitats and land-cover to compare their relative importance. Finally, we tested the independent effects of each variable in order to evaluate the significance of their contributions to the environmental model. Our results showed that spatial patterns in the composition of assemblages of almost all the considered animal groups may be ascribed mostly to variations in the environment. Although the shared effects of climatic variables, natural habitats and land-cover types explained the largest proportion of variation in each animal group, the variation explained purely by natural habitats was always higher than the variation explained purely by climate or land-cover. We conclude that most spatial variation in the composition of assemblages of almost all animal groups probably arises from biological processes operating within a spatially structured environment and suggest that natural habitats are important to explain observed patterns because they often perform better than habitat descriptions based on remote sensing. This underlines the value of using appropriate habitat data, for which high-resolution and large-area field-mapping projects are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]