Landscape research and knowledge exchange: learning from the HERCULES research project

This special issue of Landscape Research focuses on knowledge exchange in landscape research. It looks at the various roles and ways of knowledge exchange, and assesses their effectiveness, in the context of bringing together some of the findings from the recent ‘Project HERCULES’. HERCULES, an acronym for ‘HERitage in CULtural landscapES’, was undertaken as a three-year research programme completed in November 2016 and was funded by the European Commission (EC) through the ‘Seventh Framework Programme’. The cultural landscape themes with which HERCULES is concerned, and the context of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) (Council of Europe, 2000) within which it sits, have been the subject of other special issues and individual papers in Landscape Research over many years.1 In this context, Landscape Research is delighted to be the publishing outlet for a range of papers discussing various aspects of HERCULES’s findings which should be of value to researchers, policy-makers, practitioners and community groups involved in the many aspects of landscape and specifically in cultural landscapes research and management. It is all the more appropriate that it is so, given that Landscape Research Group (LRG), the charity for which Landscape Research is the main publishing arm, was a partner in the HERCULES research consortium. This Landscape Research Special Issue is being published in parallel with a Special Issue of the journal Landscape Ecology (Bürgi, Verburg, Kuemmerle, & Plieninger, in press), which contains complementary papers of a more specialised nature relevant to that journal’s readership. In the context of its purpose of providing the EC with advice on how best to deal with landscape issues, the overarching goals of the HERCULES project were to increase understanding of the drivers, dynamics, patterns, actors and values of European cultural landscapes; and to use this knowledge to develop, test, and demonstrate strategies for their protection, management, and planning (HERCULES Project, 2013). More detail about the project, together with a summary of its findings and recommendations and a discussion of a key proposal advocating the adoption of a ‘landscape approach’ to environmental governance issues, are presented in the following paper (Shuttleworth, 2017). The charitable objective of LRG as a ‘learned society’ is to ‘advance education and research, encourage interest and exchange information ... in the field of landscape and any related fields’ (LRG Ltd, 1983). This objective has been present from the Group’s founding 50 years ago, although the detailed wording has varied, for example, referring to ‘the interchange and spread of ideas about, and knowledge of, the landscape’ in the original Rules of the Group (LRG, 1968a, 1968b). An important and long-standing emphasis has been on providing ‘information which can be used by landscape designers, planners and allied professions to achieve better design decisions in terms of the human environment’ (LRG, 1972) by means of an international, multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approach. Landscape Research was founded to help deliver LRG’s objectives. Throughout their history, therefore, both LRG and Landscape Research have sought to ensure effective knowledge exchange (to use more modern terminology than the previous term ‘knowledge transfer’—Mitra & Edmondson, 2015, p. 2) between the different communities interested in landscape research. In particular, both have focused on transferring the results of the knowledge gained by researchers to policy-makers, professionals and practitioners (whether as