With the adoption of the European Landscape Convention, the protection, management, and planning of cultural landscapes has attracted broad interest from scientists, policy makers, and the general public. But as a consequence of wide-spread land abandonment, agricultural intensification, and urbanisation, many cultural landscapes have fallen into a state of crisis: Traditional practices characterised by small spatial scales, mixed cultures, low-input practices, and multiple ecosystem services are being abandoned and replaced by standardised and simplified land uses. All over Europe, efforts are being made to preserve cultural landscapes, for example extensively used mountain grasslands in the Alps, the central Italian coltura promiscua mixed cropping system, and the dehesa/montado agroforestry landscapes on the Iberian Peninsula. Though some of these efforts have proven successful, large-scale land use and subsequent landscape changes seem inevitable, which often results in a loss of ecosystem services and human well-being.

The workshop
Drawing on case studies provided by participants, the workshop aims to create, respectively enhancing, theoretical insights into the social-ecological resilience of cultural landscapes through coming to terms with – and challenging – existing concepts of “driving forces”, “thresholds”, “adaptive cycles” and “adaptive management”. We expect that an improved understanding of these issues will facilitate the fostering and advancement of future research on the resilience and sustainable management of cultural landscapes.

The basis of the workshop, and starting point for extensive discussion sessions, will be empirical studies focusing on cultural landscapes as social-ecological systems. We are especially looking forward to contributions linking ecological analysis with insights into the social processes tied to changing cultural landscapes.

The geographic focus of the workshop will be on Europe, but reference to other cultural landscapes of the world is also welcome.

The workshop will include keynote presentations by:
• Mauro Agnoletti, University of Florence (Italy)
• Carole Crumley, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) / Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden)
• Lesley Head, University of Wollongong (Australia)
• Ann Kinzig, Arizona State University (USA)
• Carlos Montes, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain / to be confirmed)
• Mats Widgren, Stockholm University (Sweden)

Participants
The workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum for about 20 PhD students, post-docs, and senior researchers from all fields of landscape research, including geography, landscape ecology, institutional economics, rural sociology, agricultural and forest sciences, and land change science.

Abstracts
Please send an abstract (ca. 300 words) to Claudia Bieling or Tobias Plieninger by 28th February 2010. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 14th March 2010. Final papers a due by 30th May 2010.

For more information and details for abstracts contact
Claudia Bieling, University of Freiburg, Germany, claudia [dot] bieling [at] landespflege [dot] uni-freiburg [dot] de
Tobias Plieninger, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Humboldt-
Universität zu Berlin, Germany, plieninger [at] bbaw [dot] de