Working Groups

1. New IALE Working Group on Landscape Ecology Education Network
2. Ecoland Forum

IALE Working Group Landscape Ecology Education Network (LE-Net)

Announcement
NEW IALE Working Group on
Landscape Ecology Education Network (LE-Net)

Get involved !!!!
The proposal for an IALE working group (WG) on training and education was approved through the IALE executive Committee on 15.07.2005. Now the idea needs to be developed and more IALE members encouraged to participate. It is proposed to organise the first official meeting during the next IALE world congress in Wageningen 2007, and elect an Executive Committee/Broad of the WG.

The training and teaching in Landscape Ecology is aimed at different levels (Master- and PhD level and possibly consultant training).

The aims of this working group are to:
• achieve an overview of existing courses (see existing initiatives as listed below);
• link to existing teaching projects/initiatives (see below);
• co-ordinate and assess teaching and training in the field on an international platform;
• develop criteria for selecting PhD and related courses linked to IALE conferences (an-nouncement through Expressions of interest);
• to asses and co-ordinate the existing (diverse) credit point system;
• to promote the needs for teaching and training in our field; and
• to set up funding sources which allow students to attend PhD courses linked to IALE congresses/research activities.

A future goal could be to get courses in Landscape Ecology and related subjects (landscape research in general) accredited. See for example RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Suvey-ors, http://www.rics.org/default.htm).

There is no membership fee for the Working Group. However members of the Working Group must be registered IALE members, or need to become one within the next 12 months. Become a corresponding, active member or even considering standing for a post? Being an Active member means that I could expect the person to respond to my emails, provide feed-back etc. A corresponding member means that you would receive news, but are not ex-pected to respond. In Wageningen the following positions need to be elected: chair of the working group and a representative to the IALE council. However there is the possibility to elect more active posts, like “curriculum officer”, “publicity officer”, “literature officer”, “credit system officer”. It would also be useful to have representative for “early-career land-scape ecologists”.
The following people have signed up already:

Aspinal, Richard (IALE-UK, IALE US)
Bolliger, Janine (IALE-CH)
Brandt, Jesper (IALE Council, Chair, IALE-DK)
Broderick, Kathleen (IALE-OZ)
Farina, Almo (IALE-Italy)
Haines-Young, Roy (IALE - UK)
Ihse, Margaretha (IALE Sweden)
Langanke, Tobias (IALE-D)
Klug, Hermann (IALE-D)
Konkoly Gyuro, Eva (IALE-Hungary)
Oliviera, Rosario (IALE-Portugal)
Palang, Hannes (IALE-Estonia) (resp. ATLAS-Project)
Pearson, Diane (IALE-OZ)
Pedroli, Bas (IALE-NL, resp. Landscape Europe, ALTERRA)
Pinto-Correira, Teresa (IALE Portugal)
Potschin, Marion (IALE Secretary General, IALE-D, IALE-UK, IALE-CH)
Syrbe, Ralf-Uwe (IALE-D Treasurer)

Suggestions for all parts of the outline are welcome.

Marion Potschin
IALE Secretary General

Ecoland Forum

Working group Ecoland Forum

ECOLAND, an official working group of IALE, is a pan-European forum for countryside and landscape monitoring, which had its first meeting in 2000. Since that time, the forum has met once or twice a year to discuss ways of promoting integrated landscape monitoring and assessment.

ECOLAND wants to encourage the production of consistent figures for landscape parameters e.g. land cover, habitats, vegetation, fauna and drivers for Europe derived from objective sampling programmes. Statistical estimates would be produced with associated error terms. This does not imply that ECOLAND itself will be responsible for the production of these figures but it should encourage, and possibly, co-ordinate the production of these figures by its component members and member organizations.

ECOLAND will suggest, and comment on, indicators of sustainability and change for various parameters that can be produced using statistical procedures, although these could well be supplemented by other measures that have been identified as sensitive to change. These will necessarily need to be limited to initiatives of national governments, such as the UK biodiversity Action Plan.

A primary principle of ECOLAND is that there should be full integration between all forms of data collection and analysis (e.g. remote sensing, aerial photographs and ground surveys), in order to utilise the advantages of the different approaches. Therefore the working group seeks to propose, develop and support frameworks that are capable of modelling scenarios of change, so that the potential impacts of European policies can be assessed.

Earlier discussions in the ECOLAND forum played an crucial role the EU FP5 programme BioHab, which developed a methodology for coordinating information on habitats in order to obtain statistically robust estimates of their extent and associated changes in biodiversity. Many forum members were involved in the project. The Handbook for surveillance and Monitoring of European Habitats has recently become available.

ECOLAND is currently in the process of writing a working paper about the European Natura 2000 reserves network, encompassing over 20 000 sites, and receiving most of the EU budget for nature conservation. Natura 2000 is Europe’s primary effort to halting biodiversity loss by 2010. Unfortunately, the wider countryside is mostly overlooked in this initiative, and monitoring efforts are still in its early stages. The ECOLAND forum is therefore discussing how its expertise could contribute to
• consistent monitoring of Natura 2000 sites
• illustrating importance of the wider-countryside to European biodiversity
• suggest ways of combined monitoring inside and outside protected sites to have a full understanding of biodiversity decline.

Chair:
Bob Bunce
Alterra Green World Research
P.O. Box 47, NL-6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
E-mail: bob.bunce@wur.nl

Secretary:
Marc Metzger
Environmental Systems Analysis Group
Wageningen University
P.O. Box 47, NL-6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
E-mail: marc.metzger@wur.nl

Those who would like to become members of this working group or join their field work meetings are invited to contact the secretary or the chair. More information on: http://www.ecoland-forum.org/