Changing Mediterranean Landscapes - Invitation to Symposium, IALE 2013

Participate in a special symposium on  Changing Mediterranean Landscapes

In:

IALE 2013 European Congress 

Changing European Landscapes: Landscape ecology, local to global

Manchester 9-12 September 2013

We especially invite members of the SCB Mediterranean Committee to participate, as well as the responders to the open call of the conference.  If you are interested in participating in this symposium, please contact the conveners:

Linda Olsvig-Whittaker (Linda.Whittaker(at)npa.org.il)
Stefan Schindler (stefan.schindler(at)univie.ac.at)



About the IALE Congress visit http://iale2013.eu
This major international event will examine how and why European landscapes are changing and how landscape ecology can help us to plan for the future at local to global scales. It will consider local projects alongside international programmes and provide many opportunities for researchers, policy makers and practitioners to interact. The congress will have a European focus but we look forward to welcoming participants from around the world.

About the Symposium: Changing Mediterranean Landscapes
Conveners: Linda Olsvig-Whittaker (Israel) and Stefan Schindler (Austria/Portugal)

The Mediterranean Basin experiences rapid change due to urbanization, rural depopulation, decreased rainfall, increased fire frequency, tourism, and competing demands for pastoral and agricultural land.  Long human occupation has created adaptable anthropogenic landscapes, but the rate of change may now exceed their resilience.  The sea itself experiences increased change from overfishing, pollution, invasive species, and coastal storm damage.  Mediterranean nations share many common features and many common concerns.  The theme of this symposium will be shared problems and shared solutions for landscape conservation under current pressures in the Mediterranean Basin.  Among the threats and pressures are rapid urbanization, rural depopulation, wildfire, tourism, changing land use (particularly pastoral/agricultural changes), anticipated increases in coastal storm damage due to climate change, and uncontrolled development.  The sea itself is a central feature of the Mediterranean Basin, and this symposium will be open to examination of changes in coastal landscapes due to marine factors such as overfishing, sedimentation, and invasive species.

For more detailed information please see the goals and recommendations of the SCB Mediterranean Committee 

During the szmposium two sessions will be held.  The first session will consist of selected formal presentations.  The second session will be a workshop on finding shared threats and shared solutions.  There will be a follow-up to the session: the Conveners are also leaders of the SCB Mediterranean Committee which aims to advance transnational networking and professional cooperation in the Mediterranean Basin. A publishable report summarizing the results of the symposium will be written by the conveners and available online, hopefully in IALE and certainly in the Mediterranean Committee's web pages in SCB.  We hope to start a database of expertise so that ecologists and conservationists working in the Mediterranean may network for communication and joint work.  This database should be available to both IALE and SCB members.  We see these as steps in developing an active Mediterranean conservation working group, and the process will continue.

Linda Olsvig-Whittaker, Stefan Schindler