Prof. Mauro Agnoletti

Mauro Agnoletti, Professor, UNESCO Chair - Agricultural Heritage Landscapes Dept. of Agricultural, Food, Environmental and Forestry Sciences and Technologies, University of Florence; President of the National Association of Historical Rural Landscape (Italy). 

He has been teaching courses on the planning of rural landscape and environmental history in Italy, the USA, Germany, France, and Poland. In 2007, he served as the coordinator of the Guidelines for Social and Cultural Values in SFM for the Inter-Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forests in Europe (MCPFE). He is the author of the country case “Italy”, dedicated to landscape and forests, in the State of the Forest of the World 2018. He is the Coordinator of the National Register of Historical Rural Landscape, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Italy, and the president of the Landscape Observatory of the Regional Government of Tuscany. The co-editor in chief of the journal “Global Environment”, White Horse Press (UK), and the editor in chief of the series on Environmental History by Springer Verlag. His book on Italian Historical Rural Landscape (2013) has been in the top 25% of the best-selling books by Springer. More: www.mauroagnoletti.com

Stephen Bramwell

Stephen Bramwell is a County Director and Regional Agriculture Specialist for Washington State University Extension. He earned an MS in Soil Science from Washington State University and a BA in International Community Development at the University of Washington Jackson School of International Studies. His areas of research and extension include use of conservation grazing for rare species and habitat protection in semi-natural grasslands; soil health management practices for grasslands, pastures, row crop production, and gardening; market development and farmer cooperatives for local agriculture and food access, including farm-to-school initiatives; specialty grain production, new farmer training, and agriculture workforce development. 

Dr. Ir. Johan Meeus

Johan Meeus, Dr. ir., is landscape architect by profession. In 1984 he took his Ph.D. at the Agricultural University in Wageningen. Analysing landscapes and research by design are the main topics. For J. Meeus drawing by hand is the best way to sketch the atmosphere of a town and a country. His objective is not to depict all the leaves on a tree, but rather to portray trees in specific surroundings. Several Dutch cities were given his advice on greening urban and rural landscapes. The European Environment Agency in Copenhagen published the first continental landscape typology of his hand in the book titled ‘Europe’s Environment; the Dobris assessment’ (1995). The Council of Europe made use of this work to formulate the European Landscape Convention (2000). At the conference, J. Meeus will refer to the scenario of development of rural landscapes that he predicted 35 years ago in his seminal work “Agricultural landscapes in Europe and their transformation” (Meeus et al., 1990, Landscape and urban planning 18, 189-352). 

Prof. Zsolt Molnár

Zsolt Molnár, Professor, Centre for Ecological Research, Hungary: Zsolt is a botanist and ethnoecologist, leader of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Research Group at the Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary. He strives to understand how traditional herding and farming communities shape their landscapes, and manage their natural resources. He has special interest in ecological knowledge behind local land-use practices, ecological aspects of local worldviews, and local conceptualizations of nature and its elements. He has been exploring the role knowledge co-production with locals can play in improving nature conservation management. He works in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Mongolia, Iran and Kenya. He is a member of the IPBES Indigenous and Local Knowledge Task Force and was a coordinating lead author of the IPBES Global Assessment. 

Prof. Ian D Rotherham

Ian D Rotherham, Emeritus Professor, Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, is an expert on a range of environmental issues, including urban wildlife, extreme weather, flooding and climate change. He has published extensively in academic journals, and has released a number of books on UK wildlife and the environment. He writes regular columns for local and regional newspapers and has a weekly phone-in on BBC Radio Sheffield and has advised and appeared for national news and documentaries. 

Prof. Piotr Tryjanowski

Piotr Tryjanowski, Professor, Poznań University of Life Sciences & Institute of Advanced Sciences TUM Munich,  self-educated ornithologist, he studied agricultural ecology, mathematical modelling, and ecology (with population ecology). His work commonly deals with agricultural areas, and more recently with urban environment. He was an expert for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and published papers with international teams in top scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Communications, Global Ecology and Biogeography. Fascinated by independency and conservation, so he launched a project “data not dogma,” looking for evidence for effective nature conservation. This has been a reason for cooperation with farmers, hunters, engineers, urban planners etc. Being very keen on interdisciplinary approach, he undertakes public and educational activities, referring to various scientific disciplines, including, besides biology, sociology, psychology and economics. His work is well is highly cited by scientific papers, textbooks, as well as covered by media.