Division of Forest, Nature and Landscape (FNL)

State-of-the-art scientific research with respect to the sustainable management of natural resources and functioning of natural and manmade ecosystems at different spatial and temporal scales are the key topics at which we aim. We work on forests, nature, agricultural land and urban green and their ecosystem services as well on the methodological tools needed to analyse and quantify science in this fields, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Decision Support Systems (DSS), multicriteria analysis, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), earth observation, ....
The division also aims at making a contribution to the scientific understanding of societal issues such as climate change adaptation, biodiversity crisis and its mitigation, bio-energy, multifunctional forest, nature and land management, a more sustainable rural and urban development including spatial planning and international development collaboration. Much of the work is explicitly interdisciplinary recognizing the complexity of ecosystems.
The main mission for us is to offer a significant contribution from science to a more sustainable development of the world and as such we want to increase the harmony between humans and ‘nature’.