Žemaičių Naumiesčio seniūnijos kraštovaizdžio geografinė-retrospektyvinė analizė

National audience ; Research aim was to analyse seminatural and agrarian urban landscape components of Žemaičių Naumiestis ward as well as social demographic factors and their changes within the ward boundaries and time scale (from soviet time till recent years) in order to distinguish the common tendencies of these changes. The seminatural landscape components – forests, water bodies and their area as well as agrarian urban components (agricultural land use with arable land, pastures and meadows, builtup territories) and their changes in time and space were analysed of social demographic factors, population, density and settlement size were focused on. The statistical and historical document analysis methods as well as distance and GIS modelling were applied. Land cover mapping of the territorial and geographic changes were computed by remote sensing using Landsat series satellite images of the studied area around Žemaičių Naumiestis town (297km2) in 1988, 1998, 2005 and 2015 and ortographic photo data method in 1997 and 2013. Žemaičių Naumiestis as a town (the old name is Naumiestis, or Nowe Miasto in Polish) was mentioned in the historical documents from the 17th century. Only in the fourth decade of the 20th century it was named Žemaičių Naumiestis – as one of the territorial administrative units of western Lithuania. The first collective farm in the ward was founded in 1959, and in the last decade of soviet governance there were two sovhozes specialised in vegetable seed husbandry, milk and meat production, one educational farm, as well as one forestry .The greatest population and its density in the ward was documented in 1970 (4,744 and 49.2 inhabitants per km2), and the greatest population in Žemaičių Naumiestis town in 1985 (2,500). At the same time rural population and its density in the ward decreased. The distinguished spatial changes of rural population decrease were observed served in the south eastern part of the ward (decrease by 40–60 and >%), where the number of small villages prevailed. A ...