It´s a great pleasure for me to invite you on behalf of the CZ-IALE as organizer of the next landscape-ecological conference (2010), within the Middle-European areas of Moravia, Silesia and Bohemia, Czech Republic.

We prepare the conference during the year of 20th anniversary of „velvet revolution“ in 1989 that brought freedom to our region after 40 years of political totality. Another point could be mentioned: our conference has a link to another landscape-ecological conference in the territory „Nature and Culture in Landscape Ecology. Experiences for the 3rd Milennium“. It was held in Prague (1998) at the occassion of the 650th anniversary of the Charles University foundation and number of persons from the IALE participated in it – Zev Naveh, Richard Forman, Bob Bunce, Henri Décamp, Adolfs Krauklis, Andrzej Richling…

Our offer reflects small temporal gap (2010) as an opportunity to bridge over the sequence of two IALE important actions: the European Conference in Salzburg 2009 and the World Congress in Beijing 2011. The proposed theme of the conference, „Landscape structures, functions and management: response to global ecological change“, follows the IALE website discussion as a starting point .

The choice of the conference venue in Brno, famous city of Moravia, is aimed to demonstrate that territory of the Czech Republic in its South-Eastern part exhibits well the impact of global warming through the climate shift towards continentality. Excursions into various directions in Moravia and the post-conference field trips in Bohemia could illustrate those phenomena.

I believe that our part of Central Europe crossing the hydrological „roof of the continent“ will attract people with creative transdiciplinary perception of landscapes.

Pavel Kovář,
on behalf of the CZ-IALE and Organizational Board of the Conference