The 8^th IALE World Congress was held in Beijing on August 18 to 23, 2011. It was the first time that this congress was held in Asia and in a developing country in its 30-year history.

The congress was jointly organized by IALE China Chapter, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, CAS, Ecological Society of China and Peking University, More than 850 attendees from 47 countries and regions attended this conference.

The theme of 8^th IALE World Congress was landscape ecology for sustainable environment and culture. Consisting of 7 plenary speeches, 13 symposiums, 520 oral presentations and 140 posters, the conference covered the topics of resilience and adaptive capacity of socio-ecological landscape systems, landscape ecology and culture protection, landscape and urban planning, accommodating biodiversity responses and engineering restoration in adapting to climate change, etc.

To encourage young researchers, IALE and Chinese Academy of Sciences sponsored 40 young scientists and graduate students from 25 countries and made them attend the conference in Beijing.

As the most renowned and influential international conference in the field of landscape ecology, IALE World Congress was held every four years. The congress represented the highest academic level of landscape ecology and was an important platform for forward looking the development and frontier domains of landscape ecology and for exchanging among different regions.

The success of the 8^th IALE World Congress in Beijing not only boosts the communication and cooperation among researchers from different countries, but also represents the academic level in China and broadens the horizons of landscape ecology.

State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology