Highlights from the IUFRO Landscape Ecology Conference 2015

Around 200 participants took part in the IUFRO Landscape Ecology Conference held in Tartu, Estonia on 23-30 August 2015. At the biannual meeting of the IUFRO Landscape Ecology Working Party, OpenNESS gave five oral presentations and one poster from forest-related case study leaders. One of the keynote speakers was Rudolf de Groot from OpenNESS Partner 3, Wageningen University. His speech was on the Role of ecosystem services in sustaining forest landscapes: ecological and economic considerations. 

A symposium was organized by Sandra Luque and Guillermo Martinez Pastur on Ecosystem Services and the Need to Be Incorporated into Forest Management Practices to Balance Multiple Uses at Different Scales. Dr. Luque introduced the symposium stressing the importance of an integrative landscape level perspective towards managing forests including associated cultural services.  The symposium featured presentations from 9 different countries, where the different case studies provided examples on balancing trade-offs between different services stressing the importance of multifunctional forest ecosystem management.

From OpenNESS, Rosina Soler, Guillermo Pastur and collaborators from CADIC presented the case study in Tierra del Fuego Argentina with focus on Integrative forest management in Southern Patagonia; Sanna-Riikka Saarela presented the ongoing work with colleagues from Syke on Participatory integrated appraisal of forest bioenergy production in Finland; Sandra Luque focused on Forest ecosystem services and trade‐offs providing the example of complex multifunctional landscapes in the French Alps case. An important discussion followed the symposium with particular emphasis on participatory approaches and ways to target efficient planning options based on ecosystem services concepts.  Plans for a special issue are under way. The Working Party from IUFRO is chaired by Sandra Luque, who is also the Deputy coordinator of Division 8 in IUFRO under the topic of Forest Environment.

For more information, visit http://iufrole2015.to.ee/eng/programme