Assessing the driving forces of landscape change in the perspective of Polish residents

• Analysis of landscape changes in Poland (2005–2020), with political, socio-economic, and cultural forces as key drivers. • Study combined quantitative mapping and qualitative surveys to assess landscape changes and their driving forces. • Political, socio-economic, cultural, technological, and natural forces shaped urban, rural, and mosaic landscapes differently. • Political forces were found to be the most significant drivers of landscape changes in the studied period. • Urbanization, afforestation, and succession were seen positively, while industrialization received more negative views. Over past 20 years analysis of driving forces of landscape change have become a popular research topic, but there is still insufficient amount of research on this issue in the countries of Eastern Europe. This is all the more important as a number of factors have accelerated changes in the landscape in the countries that have joined the European Union in recent years. The results of the research presented in the article concern the identification of those forces that significantly influenced the shape of changes from the perspective of residents living in different types of municipalities from the Lower Silesia region. The research approach used was to identify the landscape transformations that took place in the 3 time intervals 2005–2010, 2010–2015, 2015–2020, and then to present them in the form of a questionnaire to the inhabitants of the 6 municipalities that lived in the study area during the study period, asking them to identify which of the indicated phenomena or processes contributed to the indicated landscape transformations. The driving forces most often indicated by residents of the analyzed municipalities can be categorised as political forces (40.66 %), socio-economic forces (20.74 %) and cultural forces (16.61 %). However, the results showed differences in the reported drivers of landscape change depending on the type of landscape in which the changes occurred. In urban landscapes, the proportion of cultural drivers increased significantly, in contrast to agricultural or forest landscapes where natural and political forces were more important.