International‌ Landscape‌ Ecology‌ Laboratory‌ Opens at the Faculty

The Higher School of Economics has summed up the results of the project competition "Launching International Laboratories at the National Research University Higher School of Economics for the period from 01.01.2022 to 31.12.2024". As a result of the competition, one of the four new international laboratories was the International Landscape Ecology Laboratory on the basis of the Faculty of Geography and Geoinformation Technologies. Researches will create a set of methods for processing remote information aimed at using it as efficiently as possible as a source of data on the structure and organization of landscape cover.

Landscape ecology is a young field of science. Its development was influenced by the use of aerial and space photography, which made it possible to look at the landscape from a different angle. As a result, the Earth's remote sensing system defines the research object - the landscape cover as a set of elementary territorial units (pixels), the grouping of which according to various criteria makes it possible to single out the structural elements of the territory and display its spatial structure.

Currently, landscape ecology combines a wide range of approaches and methods in environmental studies, which cover all factors of the organization and functioning of the landscape and its interaction with climate and humans.

The concepts of landscape ecology penetrated Russia at the end of the 20th century along with the development of computational technologies, methods of remote sensing of the Earth, and geoinformation systems. During the past 20 years, Russian schools have been integrated into landscape ecology. For example, in 2018, with the active support of the leading scientist of our laboratory, President of the International Association for Landscape Ecology (IALE) in 2015-2019, Christine Fürst, the Russian branch of this organization was created.

On the one hand, the goal of the Laboratory is to integrate Russian landscape and ecological schools into the international scientific community and become more actively involved in the global research agenda, and on the other, to gain wider recognition of Russian original approaches.

The laboratory was created in the expectation of close cooperation with the laboratory of biogeocenology named after V.N. Sukachev of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution named after A.N. Severtsov RAS (IPEE RAS), which has a unique measuring complex of parameters of ecosystem functioning on the basis of the ecological observatory "Okovsky Forest".

The key research areas of the laboratory are the development of methods for integrating ground-based measurements of biophysical parameters of ecosystem functioning (flows of heat and moisture, greenhouse gases) with remote sensing data, the development of methods for studying the structure and organization of landscape cover, assessment and mapping of ecosystem services, and others.