Landscape Research deals scientifically with the concepts, relevant processes and impacts of the anthropogenic use of landscapes. Prominent objects of landscape research are agricultural landscapes, industrial landscapes and urban-rural landscapes especially under changing framework conditions.

Landscape research acts at global, regional, or even local scales. A core focus in landscape research is oriented on interactions of environmental, economic and social subjects in space and time. This includes mutual dependencies of land uses, as: agriculture, forestry, recreation, tourism, nature conservation, as well as the interactions within and among landscape management approaches at various scales and time levels and under different technical, political, economic, ecologic and legal settings.

Projects in landscape research operate with the theories, methods and the knowledge of several scientific disciplines (e.g. agricultural sciences, forestry sciences, geo-sciences, biology, social sciences, engineering sciences, mathematics etc.). This set of background knowledge and tools is providing synergistic effects concerning new knowledge and theories and thus continuously going to be aggregated into a meta-discipline: ‘Landscape Sciences ’.

In the field of Landscape Research a particular focus is given on scientific activities that provide impulses and stimulus on the physical and legal/administrative interaction of:

*    sustainable development of land use,

*    deriving thresholds for indicators of sustainable development in (sensitive)landscapes,

*    multifunctionality of land use,

*    issues of resource protection with land use and management,

*    sustainability impact assessment of land use and land use changes,

*    social and cultural effects and demands in relation to land use and management.

Landscape Research has an inherent emphasis to continuously identify research needs at the level of real world problems in landscape use and to highlight approaches concerning integration of disciplinary fragmented research on overlapping topics in land use development.