In August 18-23, 2011, IALE organized the 8th World Congress in Beijing, China, a highlight event for us to summarize our project in intermediary terms. It was good timing to develop ideas on designing low carbon societies. The first author and his collaborators organized three symposia in the congress. Their titles and organizers are “Urban Green Spaces, Human Health, and Eco-environment Quality” (Nakagoshi N, Kong F), “Landscape Ecological Approaches to Develop the Low Carbon Societies in East and Southeast Asia” (Nakagoshi N, Fu B, Hong SK), and “Sustainability of Protected Area Landscapes in Asian Tropical Regions” (Abdullah SA, Nakagoshi N).
The 16 peer-reviewed papers among 29 presented in three symposia and one paper in a poster session were directly related to designing low carbon societies. We invited these 17 papers as chapter articles in this book. These 19 papers including two papers in EAFES and IAVS were rearranged and distributed into four parts, namely, one introductory article of Part I; four papers in Part II: Urban Landscape Ecology; six papers in Part III: Ecologies on Cultural Landscapes; and eight papers in Part IV: Ecologies on Protected Areas.
1.1 Summary
At first, we introduced the majority of the results from the WUBR group of GELs program in Hiroshima University, which was a research and educational project from FY2008 to FY2012. After the 8th Congress of IALE 2011 in Beijing, we invited almost all papers in the three symposia to be published in the Ecological Research Monographs series by Springer. Finally, 19 papers were selected through the peer-review process. These successful papers are presented as chapter articles in the four different categories.
It is our primary goal to help young scholars gain sufficient knowledge and skills to be able to work as a specialist in his/her area of expertise, especially in landscape ecology. This book also enables learning about areas other than your own area of ecological expertise to become an expert in that field. We hope that collaborations among experts and practitioners in science and technology will continue to work toward designing a low carbon society that uses biomass and services in landscapes. Because science and technology are constantly evolving, this kind of textbook on landscape ecology has a limited lifespan. However, we urge you to take full advantage of this book. To facilitate access to relevant research results, all articles of the book have been carefully discussed among the author(s), reviewers, and editors.
