The environment relating to the history of civilization is the notion, which more and more is used when thinking about the changes occurring in Latvian culture. In this research are considered all Latvian palace and manor parks and classified as an integral part of the heritage. The research was done from the year of 2009 to 2010. Fundamental principles the quality of today’s parks were taken, first of all, evaluating the cartographical and historical materials and available literature sources, secondly, chosen, mostly historically rich and varied parks, evaluating basing on landscape evaluation criteria, and, thirdly, summarizing the qualified parks, for working out qualitative and sustainable park development models in the future researches. Working out the evaluation system and principles of historic parks, it is possible not only to reanimate the historical landscape, but also get back the total landscape atmosphere, in spite of the loss of the main ensembles or their partly ruination. The park qualification, structure investigation, landscape inventory and analysis, as well as European experience in historic landscape maintaining and development, according to a similar landscape structure, which nowadays successfully functions as a heritage, is the base for an optimal and sustainable culture landscape development. The worked out order helps in understanding and analyzing the meaning of the historic park and its successful development tendency, in which are marked out the most important heritage objects in the particular landscape and they are reverted in a vital pulse and social processes.

Development of tourism, understood as the result of human activity aimed at adapting space to the needs of tourism, requires a variety of specific spatial determinants recognized from the viewpoint of multi-dimensionality of tourist space. One of the major determinants of tourism intensity in an area are landscape values, including natural values. Natural elements of the environment (including the terrain, water reservoirs, and natural forms of land cover), sustainable landscape, or the unique cultural objects are the basis for long-term development of tourist activities. These values are characteristic of the so-called naturally valuable areas, including areas under the national and international law of different forms of nature protection. The paper aims at examining the relationship between the existing natural determinants affecting the development of tourism and the intensity of tourist movement as well as tourism intensity and the level of development of tourist facilities in the gminas of the Warmińsko-Mazurskie voivodship. The overall objective will be implemented in three stages. The first one will be to identify the existing natural determinants for the development of tourism in the Warmińsko-Mazurskie voivodship. The second phase will consist of an examination of the intensity of tourist movement and the level of the development of tourism by designating Schneider’s, Baretje’s and Defert’s indicators and the share of recreational areas. The final step will be to identify relationships between the variables obtained in the process of obtained in the two previous stages.

The emergence of human–induced edges in forested landscapes has caused major threat for the existence of habitat specialists. Woodland key habitat (WKH) concept has been created in the Baltic and Fennoscandian forests to preserve small forest parcels with a high biodiversity value in the production forests. In this study we investigated the occurrence of epiphytic lichen indicator species in black alder WKHs in Southern Latvia. In total 30 black alder WKHs with age of 84 to 129 years were chosen for analysis including stands adjacent to young, middle–aged and mature stands. Sample plots were placed at three distances from the forest edge. Our results indicate significant differences in number of species per sample plots adjacent to stands of different age. Lichen indicator species were considerably more common in habitats adjacent to mature forest stands and further (40–50 m) from the edge. From four lichen indicator species found in this study, sample plots adjacent to young stands hosted only two species. We argue that the indicator species response to human–induced edges is species specific and some of them are resistant to microclimatic changes near the edges.

Stakeholders and involved parties are crucial in a proper management of forest areas, more so in nature park areas. Urban nature areas and more remote peri-urban areas have objectively the most complex management issues due to the potentially high density of visitors and a diverse range of stakeholders. Such areas can also be valuable nature conservation and biodiversity hotspots, further making stakeholder interactions more complex. In this research, we conduct stakeholder identification for two case study areas – an urban forest nature park and a peri-urban forest nature park, with the aim of developing detailed lists of involved parties, including both public and private entities. We identified three main blocks of stakeholders (regulatory, usage, management), and detailed each group and sub-group for the case study areas. Our main results and conclusions include the identification of minor differences particularly explained by geographical and socio-economic contexts for each of the areas, with the regulatory stakeholder group overlapping the most between the two areas. The potential use of such analysis can improve or develop cooperation between previously unobserved stakeholders, and in research contexts, allow for a greater input from various parties that could have been missed in a more detailed analysis of a research area.