**2. Description of individual types of villages**

For the purpose of this study, municipalities representing individual characteristic groups of rural settlements within the Czech Republic were selected, with greater regard to the area of interest of the South Bohemian Region, or Šumava and its foothills. For such a set of municipalities, basic characteristics were always found and both current and historical materials depicting maps and real public spaces in municipalities were obtained.

For the purposes of the map comparison, the online database of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping and Cadastre, specifically the stable cadastre map from the beginning of the nineteenth century and the current orthophoto map from 2017 to 2019 were freely accessible.
