Landscape assessment for sustainable planning

The 1st International Conference on Impact Assessment of Land Use Changes (IALUC) was held from the 6th to 9th of April 2008 at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. At the meeting, 160 oral presentations (including five plenary speeches) and 69 posters by representatives from 39 countries were presented. Papers and posters in four general sessions (Tools and Models, Policies and Scenarios, Scale and Indicators, and Participation and Socio-Economy) considered various aspects of the impact assessment of land use and landscape changes. This special section of the journal Ecological Indicators consists of nine selected presentations from different sub-sessions of the IALUC conference considering the use of indicators in landscape assessment.