Prof. Mauro Agnoletti

Prof. Mauro Agnoletti is the Chair holder, of the UNESCO Chair Agricultural Heritage Landscapes, University of Florence (Italy) and Vice President of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (IALE), Editor of the Springer Series on Environmental History. He was Vice President of the European Society of Environmental History (ESEH), Chair of the Scientific Committee of FAO program on agricultural heritage systems (GIAHS), Coordinator of the Research Group on Forest History of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, Coordinator of the Italian National Register of Historical Rural Landscapes. He published nearly 250 scientific papers and 29 books. In 2019–2023, PLOS Biology named him among the world’s most influential researchers. In 2024 he received the Distinguished Service Award by IUFRO.

Prof. Erle Ellis

Erle Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). A Global Highly Cited Researcher, he studies the global ecology of human landscapes in the Anthropocene. He teaches environmental science and landscape ecology at UMBC and has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Martin School, an author of the US National Nature Assessment and the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment, Fellow of the Global Land Programme, Senior Fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, and former member of the Anthropocene Working Group. He published Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction in 2018.

Prof. Patrick Joyce

Patrick Joyce is a social historian of modern Britain and Europe, Emeritus Professor at the University of Manchester. He was raised in London as a child of Irish immigrants with peasant background. He studied at the University of Keele and received his PhD at Balliol College, University of Oxford, in 1975. Joyce is known for his theoretical work on the nature of history, especially on the relationship between history and the social sciences. Recently, he turned to a new kind of writing that combines memoir and history. His latest work is "Remembering Peasants: a personal history of a vanished world" (Penguin 2024), in which he considers how peasants in advanced western societies are now being lost to memory after millenia of time as the dominant social group. In the book, he constructs a synthesis of European peasant culture basing above all on examples from Ireland, Poland and Italy.

Dr. Ir. Johan Meeus

Johan Meeus 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/Ibolya Sáfiánné/Erika Sáfián

Prof. Zsolt Molnár, 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.

Ibolya Sáfiánné: Several of Ibolya's ancestors were shepherds. She has been farming with her husband and her husband's brother for 35 years. There are 500-600 ewes in their flock. In 2021, she founded the Hungarian Women Herder group, which includes women and girls who are engaged in animal husbandry in Hungary.

Erika Sáfián: She was born into a multi-generational shepherd family. She is 19 years old and studies agricultural engineering at the University of Debrecen. She takes part in the everyday work at their farm, be it grazing or harvesting.

Prof. Piotr Tryjanowski

Prof. Piotr Tryjanowski – 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.