Summary:

The Tuchola Pinewoods are mostly big areas of tree plantings. Around the village here there exist, however, fragments of open landscape. For a long time there have been observed, as part of them, changes in land use involving mostly the afforestation of successive areas. In the long run it can lead to radical landscape changes.
The paper has tracked down the directions and the intensity of changes in the area coverage within the Śliwice glade in the Tuchola Pinewoods over the last 136 years (1874, 1985 and 2010). There has been also determined the susceptibility to changes in the use of various agricultural land: arable land and meadows.
The changes in the coverage of the area involve mostly an increase in the share of wooded areas. The process affected mostly set-aside fields, while a definite majority of meadows have been still used. A decrease in the acreage of fields and meadows, as compared with the initial state, accounted for 56% and 17%, respectively, however meadows have started 'to shrink' recently; like fields, both before and after 1985. The areas transformed undergo fragmentation, which can lead to the disappearance of open landscape.
In the area analysed mostly fields got fragmented. The initially existing 68 big patches got divided into 185 in 1985, and some of them disappeared later. As for meadows, the changes concerned the last decades when clearly isolated small areas got smaller in number.
The fragmented fields were intensively afforested both in the first half of the 20th century, as well as over the recent years. Maintaining the open landscape in the vicinity of the Śliwice glade is closely connected with stopping that process mostly