Nowadays, the conflicts between human and environment exist in many countries and regions globally. The 8^th IALE World Congress with the theme of “Landscape Ecology for Sustainable Environment and Culture” was held in Beijing, China on August 18-23, 2011. The congress was attended by about 1000 participants from more than 47 countries or regions, who had extensive discussions on topics including biocultural diversity of landscapes, sustainable landscapes, urban landscape ecology, adaptive landscape management, landscape economics, and etc. After communicating with the keynote speakers and some other speakers at the congress, Drs. Bojie Fu and K. Bruce Jones decided to organize and edit a book entitled by the theme of the congress, based on a series of excellent papers presented in the congress.

Ultimately, sixteen chapters were collected from the contributed authors. After about one year of efforts, the book is now in production and will come out in April, 2013. The book contains three main topics based on the contents of each chapter, i.e., concepts and approaches, landscape modeling, and landscape planning and management. The chapters try to seek relationships between humans and nature from different perspectives and how landscape ecology could do in understanding and resolving the conflicts between them. We hope that the book will replenish the existing literature and provide useful information to the scholars or students in the fields of landscape ecology, geography, ecology, environmental sciences and sustainability studies. More information of the book, please refer to the webpage:

http://www.springer.com/life+sciences/ecology/book/978-94-007-6529-0.