EDITORIAL Landscape of culture and culture of landscape: does landscape ecology need culture?

The objects of study in landscape ecology become increasingly ‘‘cultural.’ ’ Humans now appropriate about 24 % the Earth’s terrestrial net primary pro-ductivity (Haberl et al. 2007), and almost all ecosys-tems and landscapes around the world have been influenced or even ‘‘domesticated’ ’ by humans (Kareiva et al. 2007). Landscapes are endowed with, and continue to foster the development of, cultures, legacies, and stories. Landscape ecology needs to incorporate the different dimensions of landscapes, especially those concerning human–environmental relationships. However, the cultural dimension of landscapes has been neither adequately studied nor considered ‘‘mainstream’ ’ in contemporary landscape ecology. To move forward, we need to develop a deeper understanding of cultural landscapes, and connect culture with nature more consciously and more effectively in landscape ecological research. Cultural landscapes—what are they? The term ‘‘cultural landscape’ ’ has been a fundamen-tal concept in geography, and was first defined as ‘‘landscape modified by human activity’ ’ by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel in the 1890s (Jones 2003). The term was introduced to English-speaking countries in the 1920s by the American geographer Carl O. Sauer who, in his seminal book, stated: The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural are the medium, the cultural landscape is the result (Sauer 1925). Since the 1960s, the concept of cultural landscape has been widely used in human geography