Summary:

In September 2015, the spatial planning legislation in Poland changed significantly as a result of the entry into force of the new law called "Landscape Act". It is related especially to the need to prepare once every 20 years a landscape audit at regional level. Landscape audit will be a document influencing on the study of spatial planning conditions and directions, local spatial development plans and protection plans for different forms of nature protection. It is supposed to be a response to the progressive degradation of the Polish landscape, as well as the way of implementing the provisions of the European Landscape Convention into Polish law, almost 12 years after its ratification. One of the possible ways of implementing the provisions of this document, apart from the identification of landscape types, is also taking notes of their changes over time and analyzing the forces and pressures transforming them.
This article evaluates the way of implementation of the European Landscape Convention in this field by analyzing the proposed content of the landscape audit. A method of assessing landscape change index has also been proposed as a way of recording the level of changes that have occurred in the landscape and identifying types of landscape transformations. The main aim of the study was to evaluate the possibility of using this methodology in landscape audit. The assessment was made on the example of Ślężański Landscape Park. The level of changes in the landscape was determined and the basic types and subtypes of these transformations were identified on the base of landscape structure maps prepared for the years 2004-2009-2014. This allowed to demonstrate that the methodology of assessing landscape change index could be also used to monitor the changes that have occurred in the landscape since the previous landscape audit.