Our Mission

TERRANOVA’s mission is to develop an unprecedented digital atlas of Europe compiled by an interdisciplinary group of researchers that combine human population patterns in the past, plants and disturbances, animal development, and climate change.

Based on this atlas we will give strategic guidelines and policy measures for politicians and landscape practitioners, prove the strength of interdisciplinary research in academia in the Anthropocene and to raise sustainable awareness on landscape reform among academia, the commerce and the general public.

Our ultimate mission and goal of our consortium is to inform the policy makers and general public how to cope with the current transition into the Low Carbon Society.

A more nuanced understanding of the deep history of our cultural landscapes and the influence of changing human-environment interactions on the current state of the environment is required to be able to develop sustainable ways of dealing with landscape changes in the future. Particularly important for Europe’s landscapes are their relations to long-term history, as much of their cultural identities and values are embedded in their historical development. Events taking place over the last decades are currently taken as the baseline for addressing issues of landscape management, while archaeological research highlights that intense human impacts on the environment have a much longer history. Furthermore, the reliance on short term baselines often overlooks critical phases in the cyclicity and temporality of emerging landscape processes. Consequently, future sustainable landscape management requires capacity in accommodating current and future landscape processes blended with an understanding of cultural values and the landscape’s long-term natural and cultural development. This in turn requires the fostering of a new generation of landscape managers, planners and scientists, who are able to integrate the experimental and deductive lines of reasoning of the natural sciences with the holistic and critical perspectives of the humanities and social sciences adopting good communication skills to take this knowledge to policymakers and the public. TERRANOVA is exactly aimed to fill this urgent need, to promote sustainable use and conservation of landscapes.

TERRANOVA aims to train Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) working with policy makers and the wider society with a deep appreciation of a wide range of sectors affecting landscapes, and to form a new generation capable of coproducing responses to the interdisciplinary challenges of land management where ecosystem services, cultural heritage, and economic qualities are balanced and preserved, taking into consideration ongoing climate, environmental and social change