Historical gardens and parks established around manors form an integral part of the European cultural landscape. Recent studies have revealed that manor gardens may serve as local hotspots of biodiversity and provide cultural ecosystem services within urban areas and also in rural landscapes. As a consequence of dramatic land-use changes in recent centuries, followed by a significant loss and degradation of natural habitats, manor gardens often serve as refugia for organisms within the cultural landscape.
To compare the proportion of natural habitats in manor gardens with the surrounding landscape, both intensively used and seminatural landscapes were distinguished within a grid using Coordinated Information on the Environment (CORINE) land cover data for the Czech Republic. One hundred manor parks were randomly selected, followed by a grid overlay of data from the Natura 2000 mapping system. Proportions of natural habitats were calculated for each park in relation to the surrounding landscape.
The results confirmed that manor parks, compared with the surrounding landscape, play an important role in the conservation of natural habitats, especially in areas with a high level of human impact. For the parks studied, occurrences of the following natural habitat types from the Natura 2000 system were recorded: forests (25.4 % of the park area), secondary grasslands (4.4 %), streams and water bodies (1.6 %) and wetlands and riverine vegetation (0.5 %). The proportion of natural habitats within the parks compared to the surrounding areas was significantly higher in the majority of cases.
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