摘要：Agricultural intensification and abandonment of traditional farming are currently recognised as one of the major threats to biodiversity. Also in the case study area, the Biosphere reserve “Wienerwald”, a loss of landscape diversity and a decrease of species and biotopes can be noticed. In order to provide a basis for conservation management decisions we identified the spatial heterogeneity of selected types of agricultural landscapes and assessed their ecological functionality. We compared landscape sites according to their complexity. The main objectives were: (1) to assess landscape structure by ground truthing (matrix, patch origin and corridor inquiries) and to compare the results with previous landscape structure classifications, which were based on aerial orthophotos, (2) to complement the analyses of landscape structure with biotic data (habitat mapping and vegetation inventory) in order to assess the ecological value of landscape components, and (3) to compare different methods (landscape structure analysis, habitat mapping and vegetation inventory) for assessing ecological value. One important result of this study was that the rough classification of the interpretation of aerial orthophotos could be partly affirmed by ground truthing. A significant difference of landscape diversity was determined between the landscape sites of high and low complexity. Low complex sites were strongly influenced by humans and biotope diversity was low. The more complex landscape sites provided a higher density and diversity of ecologically valued biotopes, but these sites were commonly endangered due to the proceeding urbanisation. In order to identify ecologically valuable biotopes, which are of great interest to nature conservation, habitat mapping is indispensable.
