Exploring Agricultural Landscapes: Recent Progress and Opportunities for Eurasia

Most vegetated land on earth has been used for agriculture for hundreds of years, shaping the land’s features and functions. Agricultural (rural) landscapes are the basis for feeding the global population and meeting their many other demands. In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, agriculture is facing some crucial challenges: feeding more people whilst maintaining natural resources, biodiversity and landscape heritage, and mitigating climate change. This requires new knowledge, innovations and decision tools for taking responsible action. Research on agricultural landscapes provides analyses to help understand landscape processes and elaborates sustainable scientific, technical and cultural solutions. We report on recent progress in some topics of measuring, modelling and monitoring processes, and on organismic diversity in agricultural landscapes, focusing on developments in Western Europe. Information is also given about long-term experimental agricultural research in Russia and neighbouring countries. Results indicate that there has been considerable progress in understanding landscape processes based on experimental and modelling research on different scales. A number of landscape-related research methods and tools have been developed in recent years. These include high-tech measurement systems, models and decision aids, and tools for monitoring and optimising agricultural systems and for agri-environmental monitoring. Many of them also have potential for successfully tackling existing problems with the sustainability of agricultural systems in other landscapes and regions. Transdisciplinary international research projects are required to make innovations operable.