Enclosed land in Slovakia

They appear as relicts in traditional cultural landscapes. Types of traditional cultural landscapes were published in the Landscape Atlas of the Slovak Republic (Miklós and Hrnčiarová, eds., 2002). Enclosed fields in some cases appear in traditional landscape type with scattered settlements, as we document in Fig. 2 in the cadastral area of Budiná and Hriňová (Fig. 7), however it is not regular. They occur as opened as well as closed forms. Both forms are documented in the cadastral area of Budiná (Fig. 3). I attached a map with potential occurrence of enclosed fields in Slovakia (Fig. 13) in traditional landscapes and a map with real occurrence of enclosed fields in cadastral areas that were mapped during the field research in 2010-2013 in the central Slovakia (Fig. 14). This research has never been published before.

Enclosed fields correspond with land ownership and their boarder was built predominantly of stones (Fig. 4, 6 in the cadastral area of Horný Tisovník), woody plants or fruit trees were planted on the boarder (Fig. 7 in the cadastral area of Hriňová; Fig. 8 in cadastral area of Kremnické Bane). Stone walls are usually built from stones which were collected from fields during cultivation process lasting for several generations. They were predominantly used as non-intensive pastures or meadows (Fig. 1, cadastral area of Budiná, locally intensively as ploughland (Fig. 12, cadastral area of Železná Breznica). They originally were a part of mixed silvo-agro-pastoral systems (Fig. 4, 5 in the cadastral area of Horný Tisovník).

Hedges are important biotopes of plants and animals as shown several authors (Pazúrová et al., 2010, Špulerová et al., 2012, Dobrovodská, Štefunková, 1996). Anyway no mapping of enclosed fields as special structure of the landscape has been done in Slovakia.