Whether you're out in the field working or taking a leisure trip in the countryside this summer, no doubt you'll be taking photos to record what you see and do. If you take any landscape photos, don't keep them to yourself or just share them on social media - contribute them to the image-library we're building on flickr!
Imagery is an important tool in landscape ecology. One the founding fathers of landscape ecology, Carl Troll, started his explorations of spatial pattern and process through the use of aerial photography, and more recently imagery from satellites has become an important data source for landscape ecology investigation. But photos from the perspective of an observer on the ground - you with your camera - are also a vital tool for communicating important landscape ecology concepts like environmental change and cultural heritage.
We're building a landscape ecology image library as a resource - complementary to other data sources - to help illustrate landscape ecology concepts, conceptualise processes, capture change, and exemplify typical landscapes. Members of the current ialeUK committee have made a start on the library (as the links below show), but to really grow it we need your help!
By contributing your landscape images you can help to:
- Exemplify types of landscapes including lowland rural, forested, seascape and others.
- Illustrate landscape ecology concepts and tools, like mapping, pattern-process interactions and cultural landscapes.
- Highlight particular components of landscapes, such as fields, walls, rockpools and more.
- Portray organsims of interest in landscapes, whether cows, ponies, or something more exotic.
Or you can just share pictures of your favourite landscapes to show off their beauty, whether in the UK and the rest of the world.
All images in the library will be freely available for anyone to share and adapt, under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA licence (read more on this and other details here). So if you don't want to submit your own photos but just enjoy or use what is already there, that's fine. But it would be great if you could submit your own photos, especially if using images others are providing. And please tell others about the landscape ecology image library and encourage them to submit.
You can submit your landscape images individually using this form. If you have more than a few images to submit, email publicity@iale.uk for information on how you can submit multiple photos as once.
When submitting photos we ask that you provide some information about the photo to help organise images in the library and enable others to find them easily - some of this info is required and some is optional. More details on what information is required is available here.
We hope you'll enjoy the images in the library and find uses for them - if you do, we'd love to hear how you're using them!