Geoconservation of landscape parks in Poland

The idea of establishing protected landscape parks was put forward in Poland 50 years ago. The result was fairly quick expansion in the number of protected landscape areas, up to 120 by now. Figures 1 and 2 show the progress in creation of such areas and their geographical distribution. The major goals and approach in management of the landscape parks were changing in time. The following stages may be distinguished in the landscape parks policy: protection of environment followed by landscape protection, protection of nature diversity and currently - biodiversity conservation (in accordance with Natura 2000 prerogatives). Also "geodiversity" make it necessary to treat the existing landscape parks as the potential areas of geoparks. One of key requirements which should be met by geoparks is a network of geological sites subjected to legal protection. These sites are the "backbone" of geopark. The paper presents situation in the Polish landscape parks with regard of this requirement by the end of the year 2008. At that time the number of geoconservation objects selected and categorized in 75 of those parks reached 551 (Fig. 3). Table 1 shows the typology of geological sites in relation to their importance for the Earth sciences The objects of the category A are the most valuable for geology whereas the remaining ones are mainly of geomorphological (B) and hydrological (C) value. Tables 2, 3 and 4 show the current state of conservation of geological sites in Polish landscape parks. In that presentation the area of Poland was divided into two parts with the line of extent of the Warta Glaciation as the boundary (Fig. 2). The Pleistocene deposits predominate north of that boundary whereas rocks of older stratigraphic units crop out at the surface south of it