Human impact on rural landscapes in central and northern Europe

To analyse human influences on rural landscapes in present-day central and northern Europe and also to investigate sustainable landscape development concepts, an IALE (International Association for Landscape Ecology) regional Conference on ‘Perspectives of Rural Landscapes in Europeʹ was held in Pärnu, Estonia on 20–27 June 1996. The conference was undertaken specifically to exchange information between planners, managers, decision makers and scientists in the region. In the last few years, rural landscapes in Europe have changed significantly. Due to restructuring of agriculture in the European Union (EU) countries and radical socio-economic changes in eastern and central Europe, landscape change will continue. This stimulates interest for landscape ecologists to study the processes connected with such rapid development and to analyse its socio-economic and ecological consequences. Different conference findings that resulted from six keynote speeches, 33 oral presentations, 21 posters and organised excursions (1-day conference excursion and 4-day post-conference excursion) are presented here. Thirteen papers published as part of this special issue of Landscape and Urban Planning, and summarised here, deal with general and methodological principles of the analysis of land use changes and related landscape evaluation, and also present case studies on land use changes from Estonia, Germany and Sweden.