European Land Use Spatial Data Sources and Their Role in Integrated Planning: Opportunities and Challenges for Poland

One of the 34 themes of the spatial datasets of Directive 2007/2/EC INSPIRE is 'land use', rightly described independently of 'land cover'. Laws in most countries, apart from the Netherlands, do not consider the electronic form of plans as a legally binding document. As far as the elaboration step and the adoption step are concerned, the main land use requirement is related to the datasets that describe existing land use at present and in the past. Surveys and case studies concern Poland and were carried out in two stages, I in 2011-2013 and II in 2017-2019. Previous research on this subject concerned 'planned land use', especially attempts to standardize the classification of sub-local zoning plans and omit the creation of a metadata profile for existing land use. The main goal of the qualitative research is to assess the completeness of the available spatial datasets of existing and planned land use, conditioned by the needs of users. The author recommends the establishment in Poland of a new type of regulatory 'Land Use Plan' for the area of an entire municipality. As a summary, the author's model of 'The spatial planning system in the integrated development system of Poland' was presented.