t: Changes in landscape utilisation affect the environment through landscape diversity and biodiversity changes. The land cover composition is the result of co-acting social-economical and natural processes that can impact biodiversity in positive or negative manner. Thereby the changes in land cover within a specific time period can indicate possible or ‘visualise’ the existing trends in social-economical development. The point is how to interpret changes in landscape structure in terms of these trends and how to quantify them in various spatial scales for the evaluation purposes, e.g. pressures on biodiversity. The paper presents results of the first step of such evaluation applied on local level of individual city districts of the Nitra city. By means of comparison of five land cover maps capturing time periods around years 1780, 1840, 1950, 1990, and 2010 six main types of land cover changes have been identified and evaluated; urbanisation, agriculture intensification, deforestation, afforestation, land abandonment, and drainage. The rate of individual change types was calculated for each city district and development trends have been described.