| Abstract: Every so often, someone or some group attempts to set forth an agenda for their discipline. The disciplines of landscape ecology and conservation, while young, are old enough to have experienced this several times. Such agenda-setting is a useful activity: it highlights key issues in a discipline, helps to focus research and funding on these issues, attracts attention because it is "forward-looking," and may even accelerate progress in understanding and foster wider application of the science to real-world problems. Yet agendas are usually confined to particular disciplines. I argue that landscape ecology and conservation are broadly overlapping and mutually reinforcing disciplines. Consequently, agendas developed by considering the shared issues and approaches may be more powerful, compelling, and productive than those developed in isolation. But where to begin? I suggest that many of the issues in both landscape ecology and conservation revolve around land use and land-use change. Land use is increasingly the prime determinant of all those attributes of landscape structure and function that landscape ecologists measure and analyze, and in many places it is the primary threat to biodiversity conservation and a major constraint on the effectiveness of protected areas. Understanding the socioeconomic and cultural drivers of land use can help practitioners in both disciplines frame their research agendas and develop ways of communicating their knowledge and understanding to those charged with management or decision making. |