THE LANDSCAPE, THE EUROPEAN LANDSCAPE CONVENTION AND THE LAW

An integrated approach to the landscape management requires an exact formulation of the concept of landscape and its structure. Nowadays, basically at least two main streams of the landscape ecology and thus of the concept of landscape might be identified: we may say the "hard", i.e. geosystem-based concepts, and the "soft", i.e. cultural-heritage, value and perception-based concepts of landscape. This division is not a ranking, just a differentiation. Without any doubt a landscape type defined exactly, e.g. with relief dissection or soil depth, has a different normative effect than the characteristics of the beauty of a landscape part. It does not mean at all that the beauty and other similar values are not important indices of the landscape. The opposite is true: right because of their fuzzy character their implementation needs more diligence, in order not to lose them. Nevertheless, those different approaches to the landscape offer different possibilities for their implementation to legislation and to real planning processes. The geosystem approach became the basis for implementation of landscape ecological planning and eco-network planning in Slovakia. Recently, the cultural heritage concept is significantly supported by the European Landscape Convention.