Land-use and cover change (LUCC) impacts global environmental changes. Therefore, it is crucial to obtain cross-national level LUCC data that represents past and actual LUCC. As urban areas exhibit the most significant dynamics of the changes, accompanied by such processes as urban sprawl, it seems desirable to take into account LUCC information from such areas to acquire national level information. The paper analyses land-use changes (LUCs) in urban areas in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia. The analysis is based on functional urban area (FUA) data from the European Urban Atlas project for 2006 and 2012. The area of urbanised land grew at the expense of agricultural areas, semi-natural areas, and wetlands over the investigated period in all three countries. The authors determined LUC direction models in urban areas based on the identified land-use change. The proposed LUC direction models for the investigated period and area should offer national level LUC data for such purposes as modelling of future changes or can be the point of reference for planning analyses. The paper proposes the following models: mean model, median model, weighted mean model where the weight is the urbanised to vegetated area ratio, and weighted mean model where the weight is the share of urbanised areas. According to the proposed LUC models, areas considered as urbanised grow in FUAs on average in six years by 5.5900‰ in Czechia, 7.5936‰ in Poland, and 4.0769‰ in Slovakia. Additionally, the change models facilitated determination of a LUC dynamics ratio in each country. It reached the highest values in Poland and the lowest in Slovakia.

This article investigates the land use and land cover (LULC) mosaic as a function of distance to the city centre. The research area is four Functional Urban Areas (FUAs) of the capitals of Central European countries: Czechia (Prague), Poland (Warsaw), Slovakia (Bratislava), and Hungary (Budapest). The article presents LULC mix changes in these FUAs in the context of transformations in urban cores and commuting zones of capital city metropolises, which have large populations and prominent positions in the country or region. The study makes use of Urban Atlas LULC data for 2006, 2012, and 2018. LULC change was analysed using a hexagonal tessellation with the hexagon as the basic spatial unit. Spatial entropy (ENT) and Simpson’s Diversity Index (SIDI) were employed. The change in ENT and SIDI were determined as a function of distance to urban cores, as well as changes on the first level of Urban Atlas nomenclature for 2006–2012 and 2012–2018, as well as on the third level of nomenclature for 2012–2018. The research shows that changes from 2006 to 2012 were more considerable than from 2012 to 2018. It also revealed that, if LULC classes are considered on the first level of nomenclature, diversity in urban cores grows and then declines in commuting zones. An analysis of diversity on the third level of nomenclature demonstrated its decline with the growing distance to the urban core. It has also been demonstrated that the mean values of ENT and SIDI are approximately twice as high in urban cores as in commuting zones, indicating a plateau of the mean value of ENT and SIDI over the study period in urban cores compared to an increase in commuting zones around them. The conducted research will be helpful to urban planners and decision-makers in directing the further, inevitable development of metropolitan areas in accordance with sustainable environmental management.

The land use mix (LUM) is among the critical issues in spatial planning because it can determine the occurrence and structure of various land use and cover types (LUC) and prevent any adverse patterns. The paper focuses on the LUM in functional urban areas (FUAs) in Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary. The research employed Urban Atlas (UA) data on LUC in 2006 and 2012 to characterise LUM in the FUAs. The research follows the division of the FUA into the urban area (urban core, UC) and its functional surroundings (commuting zones, CZ). We further characterised the phenomena investigated for the entire country, region, and Europe using Corine Land Cover (CLC) data. The LUM was quantified with the entropy index (EI), dissimilarity index (DI), and multi-dimensional balance index (MBI). The EI demonstrated that the investigated FUAs went through more substantial LUM changes than the 27 European Union member states (EU27) from 2006 to 2012. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that LUM overspill was more intensive in CZs than in UCs on the regional and national levels. We found out that urbanised areas grew at the expense of agricultural areas in both UCs and CZs with similar dynamics in 2006–2012 in all the analysed countries.

The goal of this paper is to determine and analyze the common geocenter signal from the geocenter coordinates based on four independent techniques: Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment with the ocean bottom pressure model, and Satellite Laser Ranging, and to analyze the residuals as the differences between these geocenter coordinates and their common signal. Another objective of this paper is to compute variable amplitudes and phases of the annual and semi-annual oscillations in the geocenter coordinates of these techniques by the combination of the Fourier Transform Band Pass Filter (FTBPF) with the Hilbert Transform (FTBPF + HT) and to compare their mean values with those obtained by other authors. It was assumed that the geocenter time series of individual techniques consist of the common signal of geocenter motion, systematic errors resulting from orbital modeling and noise. Generally, the annual oscillation amplitudes in these techniques computed by the FTBPF + HT vary in time and their mean values are of the order of 2 mm for the X coordinate, 2.4–3.6 mm for the Y coordinate and 2.8–5.6 mm for the Z coordinate and the semi-annual oscillation amplitude is variable and about two times smaller than the annual one. The phases of these two oscillations are also variable, there are differences in their mean values for different techniques and the semi-annual oscillation phases changes throughout the entire phase range. To detect the common geocenter signal the wavelet-based semblance filtering (WBSF) method was applied. The weighted mean model was computed from all geocenter coordinate pairs from individual techniques assuming weights as inversely proportional to the variances of differences between the geocenter coordinates and their corresponding WBSF outputs. The average and median models computed from these outputs show a good agreement with the weighted mean model and generally, the average amplitudes of the annual signal in these models are of the order of 2 mm in each geocenter coordinate. The FTBPF amplitude spectra of these models reveals the retrograde annual oscillation in the XY equatorial plane. The FTBPF and FTBPF + HT amplitude spectra of geocenter time series and their residuals show mainly the maxima of different heights in the annual frequency band. The annual oscillations left in all residuals and oscillations with period less than ~ 120 days in DORIS and GNSS amplitude spectra may be caused by systematic errors of techniques resulting from mis-modeling of satellite orbits.