Abstract
The cultural landscape of Central Europe is the result of long-lasting human impact on the abiotic and biotic site conditions. Whereas the anthropogenous change of the agrarian landscape that was kept artificially free from forests through historical and actual landuse is obvious, this often is less easy to notice in woodland areas with their 'relative near-naturalness'. Taking the Spessart (Germany) as an example it is shown how a natural unit with a high percentage of forests can be differentiated into spatial parts on the base of site factors and especially different settlement and landscape history. For four distinguished regions in the Spessart major objectives for future woodland development are derived from site conditions, cultural history and actual vegetation of the forests. So, general objectives of nature conservation in forests, such as protection of ecological processes ('Prozessschutz'), conservation of species and biotopes and protection of resources and ecosystems (e.g., the transformation of coniferous forests into mixed deciduous forests) obtain a regionalized priority. With special regard to wooded regions it is stressed that the synthesis of the natural and the culture historical character of a landscape should be the base for spatial differentiated leading ideas in landscape planning.