**5. Conclusions**

In this paper the intensity of the urban landscape for seven metropolitan areas in Poland and one in Germany was assessed. The analyses were conducted at three levels of detail: the metropolitan area level, municipalities level and hexagons level. The conducted research allows the following conclusions to be drawn:


The conducted studies give new research prospects concerning landscape analysis in metropolitan areas such as driving forces. Furthermore, the changes in ULII value in particular time periods may be also analyzed. Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that the same dataset must be used to make the results comparable. It is connected with the fact that the value of ULII could be influenced by many different factors such as different types of dataset, map scale, type of basic units. Monitoring landscape changes based on the CLC update and the use of the indicators presented in this article, and predicting the directions of landscape transformation as a result of driving forces are some of the most important challenges of contemporary interdisciplinary research. The results of the research may be useful for regional policy, e.g., in the preparation of urban planning documents and spatial development strategies.

**Supplementary Materials:** The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445 X/10/1/51/s1, Figure S1: Administrative division of metropolitan areas.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, U.M.-P.; methodology, A.Z.-S., K.P.-K. and M.S.; software, J.N.; formal analysis, A.Z.-S., K.P.-K. and M.S.; investigation, A. ˙ Z.-S., K.P.-K. and M.S.; resources, ˙

˙

J.N.; writing—original draft preparation, U.M.-P., A.Z.-S., K.P.-K. and M.S. All authors have read and ˙ agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Publicly available datasets were analyzed in this study. This data can be found here: Corine Land Cover: https://land.copernicus.eu/pan-european/corine-land-cover, Chief Geodesy and Cartography Office (GUGiK) data: https://mapy.geoportal.gov.pl/imap/Imgp\_ 2.html, OpenGeodata of Nord-rhein-Westwalen data: https://www.opengeodata.nrw.de/produkte/ (accessed on 19 November 2020).

**Acknowledgments:** We gratefully acknowledge three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
