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138 ANNA VARGA
As in other parts of the World, the European landscapes with natural vegetation
and biota are almost exclusively cultivated as well (Europe 2000; Solymosi 2011;
Konkoly et al. 2021). A mere 5 % of the territory of the European Union is exempt
from any human influence, and is therefore exclusively influenced by environmental
factors (Agnoletti — Rotherham 2015). It has been demonstrated for one of the
EU’s nature conservation habitat types marked Natura 2000 (Halada et al. 2011)
that out of 231 types of biodiversity (a multitude of different natural kinds), the
preservation of 63 types depended on some kind of agricultural activity, first of
all pasturing and hay-making, e.g., the European dry heaths (4030), the Pannonic
loess steppe grasslands (6250), or the Scandinavian (9070) and Iberian peninsula's
evergreen wood pastures (6310). The greatest threat to these habitats and cultivated
landscapes and their biocultural diversity is the abandonment of landscape use
(Tärrega et al. 2009), the loss of traditional ecological knowledge (Rotherham
2007) and the cessation of the resilient use of the resources in the landscape (Fischer
et al. 2012). In Europe, these processes gained momentum during industrialization
and soared after World War II (Johann 2007; Chételat et al. 2013). There are
regions where the break with traditional landscape use occurred relatively early,
e.g., in England (Rotherham 2007) or Switzerland (Bürgi — Gimmi 2007), but
there are other, mainly marginal, regions, such as some areas in Central and Eastern
Europe, where these processes began to take off only recently (Ivascu — Rakosy
2017: 21). There is hardly any European landscape where giving up the traditional
use of the landscape or intensifying agriculture has not created problems of
conservation (MacDonald et al. 2000). The most spectacular forms of this change
are the spreading of shrubbery in the abandoned areas, the homogenization of the
landscape structure, and the emergence of compact forests, tree plantations or