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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
